Some days ago, in company with several other eminent men of this place, I paid a visit to the soda lakes of Wyoming, and will give a short, truthful and concise description of their general appearance.
The lake or soda beds are situated about twelve miles southwest of Laramie, in a direct line according to official survey, but the road makes a slight variation from a direct line and therefore makes the distance about fourteen miles.
In a kind of basin toward Sheep Mountain, the finest of a series of hills intervening between the broad Laramie Plains and the Snowy Range, lie these lakes, four in number, with no outlet whatever.
Just as you get plumb discouraged and have ceased to look for the lakes, they all at once lie at your feet in all their glistening, dazzling, snowy whiteness.
One of these lakes, to all appearances, is the source of water supply for the balance, and from the exterior the water is constantly crystallizing in the sun and forming a thick crust of sulphate of soda.
When we went out, it was one of those dry, clear, bracing days in the month of July, in Wyoming, when the crisp air fans your cheek and fills every vein, artery and capillary and pore with a glad exhilarating sense that you are freezing to death.
Well, the day we went out to the lakes it was that way only not so much so.
It was not, therefore, difficult to imagine the broad, white crust over those lakes to be ice and snow. They are of the purest snowy white, and when cut into, the crust has that deep sea blue of ice when cut in like manner.
This crust of sulphate of soda is nearly three feet in depth and is perfectly firm, so that the heaviest loads drive over it with safety.
The water which oozes up through the crust at intervals is quite warm, being at the surface on a cool day about blood temperature, and of course at a considerable depth much higher.