Wendover

A windswept airfield on the Utah-Nevada line that held the most consequential secret of the war. Wendover opened in 1940 as a bombing and gunnery range — its isolation and empty desert were the whole point. Twenty-one heavy bomb groups trained here, but in late 1944 Colonel Paul Tibbets brought the 509th Composite Group: 15 specially-modified "Silverplate" B-29s and 1,800 men, training to deliver a weapon almost none of them knew about. The base went maximum-security, with signs reading "What you see here, what you do here, what you hear here, stays here." The Enola Gay flew here on June 12, 1945, practiced dropping dummy "pumpkin" bombs shaped like Little Boy and Fat Man, then left for Tinian. The dry desert that hid the secret also preserved the base — it's now the Historic Wendover Airfield Museum, with the Enola Gay's restored B-29 hangar still standing.

30,000 acres of perfectly flat, blindingly white salt crust in northwestern Utah. The land speed record has been set and broken here dozens of times. From altitude, the salt flats create a surreal, almost lunar landscape — a perfect white plane surrounded by mountains. In certain light conditions, the flats create mirror-like reflections. The Black Rock Racing area is marked by faint tire tracks visible from above. Speed Week (usually August) brings hundreds of custom vehicles.

On the remote north shore of the Great Salt Lake, at Rozel Point, a coil of black basalt 1,500 feet long curls out into the water; this is Spiral Jetty, the most famous piece of land art in the country, built by sculptor Robert Smithson in 1970 from 6,000 tons of rock and earth trucked to the spot. The whole point of it is that it is meant to be seen from above; on the ground it is just a low rock causeway, but from the air the spiral reads clean against the pink, salt-heavy water. It comes and goes with the lake. It sat submerged from 1972 until 2002, and drought has since left it high and dry, sometimes with a mile of cracked lakebed between it and the shore. Whether you see it at all depends on the year.

Southwest of Salt Lake, on the east face of the Oquirrh Mountains, the ground is simply missing. Bingham Canyon is the largest man-made excavation on Earth: a copper pit two and a half miles across and three-quarters of a mile deep, terraced in concentric rings down to a floor you can barely make out from the rim. It has been worked since 1906, first as Utah Copper and now as Rio Tinto's Kennecott operation, and it has produced more copper than any mine in history; over 17 million tons. It is deep enough to stack two Empire State Buildings inside and wide enough to be plainly visible from orbit. Those stair-step benches are haul roads, sized for trucks with tires taller than a Cessna. It is a National Historic Landmark, an odd title for a hole, but there is nothing else like it.