After the Glacial period the present arid climate began to prevail in the land. Hundreds of the shallow lakes which had been scattered over this extensive region disappeared. Others contained water for only a portion of each year. A body of water which is not permanent, but comes and goes with the seasons, we call a playa lake. Many of these playa lakes present in summer a hard, yellow-clay floor of many miles in extent and entirely free from vegetation. The beds of others are covered with a whitish crust, formed of the various salts which were in solution in the lake water.
FIG. 44.—ROGERS LAKE, MOHAVE DESERT
A playa lake
An important feature of the lakes of the Great Basin is the presence of large quantities of such substances as common salt, soda, borax, and nitre. The ocean is salt because it has no outlet, while the rivers of the globe are continually bringing into it various minerals, dissolved from the rocks over which they flow. Lakes with outlets are not salty, because with a continuous change of the water there is no opportunity for the minerals to accumulate, although they are always present in small quantities. Any lake which does not receive enough running water to cause it to overflow the borders of its basin, will in course of time become rich in various kinds of salt.
No two of the lakes of the Great Basin are alike in the composition of their waters. This fact may be due to a difference in the rocks about the lake basin, to the presence of varying mineral springs, or to the drying up of one or more of the lakes at some time so that their former salts were buried under sands and clays when the water again filled the basin.
Great Salt Lake contains little besides common salt. In Mono Lake, soda and salt are equally important constituents, while Owens Lake contains an excess of soda. In other basins borax was present in such quantities that when the waters dried up it formed important deposits. The value of these deposits is now fully understood, and many enterprising companies are at work separating and purifying the borax.
Owens Lake was once fresh, although now it is so strong with soda that it would destroy the skin if a bather should remain in it very long. The former outlet of this lake was toward the south, through a pass separating the Sierra Nevada from the Coso Mountains. For a distance of thirty miles the old river-bed has been transformed into a wagon road, and it is interesting to ride all day along the bed of this dead river, past bold cliffs against which the waters once surged and foamed. The river emptied far to the south, into a broad, shallow lake whose former bed is now white with soda and borax. The old beach lines stand out distinctly upon the slopes of the enclosing mountains.
The lake bed is now the seat of an important industry—the gathering of the borax and its refining. There are extensive buildings at one spot upon its border, and men come and go across the blinding white surface. A twenty-mule team dragging three huge wagons creeps slowly along the base of the distant mountains, but all that can be distinguished is a cloud of dust.
