Playa Works: The Myth Of The Empty

A Tour of the Playa, Part III: Wendover

A Tour of the Playa, Part III 77 ATour of the Playa Part III: Wendover 78 Playa Works Three great voids upon the sphere of the earth are defined in American imagination by heat and salt and emptiness. The first and oldest in our culture is the Dead Sea, which lies within Jordan and Israel at 1,312 feet below sea level. It is the lowest and saltiest body of water on earth. Four thousand years ago, the region was a fertile agricultural area; the archaeological and geological records show that around 1900 b.c. an earthquake of sizable dimensions, perhaps accompanied by explosions of natural gas and other petroleum products, destroyed what the Bible refers to as Sodom and Gomorrah.Another, more subtle disaster awaits there today. In the last forty years, the surface of the Dead Sea has dropped 262 feet because of the diversion of 90 percent of its freshwater sources for upstream agricultural irrigation. The creation of a toxic situation similar to that at the Aral Sea seems possible. The second is one of our own national parks and, although within California, also within the Great Basin. Death Valley, at 282 feet below sea level,is a contestant for the hottest place on the planet.Libya holds the record for the highest air temperature, 136.4ºf observed in 1922, but Death Valley is only slightly lower at 134º in 1913. The American reading, however, wasn’t taken at the lowest and hottest part of the valley—on the salt pan, or saline playa known as Badwater Basin— where the temperature is known to run consistently several degrees higher. In order to understand the effects of such extreme temperatures upon the human body, the American military quantified them, while fighting the Germans in North Africa during World War II, as follows: Walk around when it’s 120º and you’ll lose a quart of water an hour from your body through perspiration. Fail to replace the water and you can walk for a maximum of seven miles, or about two hours, before collapsing.You’ll be dead within a day. The third lacuna is the Great Salt Lake and the desert that extends westward from it. Second only to the Dead Sea in saltiness (and up to eight times as salty as the oceans), it’s not below sea level yet occupies the most profound basin within the entire Great Basin, its sediments over twelve thousand feet deep in places. It is a definitive desert space A Tour of the Playa, Part III 79 by its size and the abruptness of its borders. Drive east out of Elko on Interstate 80 and come over the last pass in Nevada, a small rise just before Wendover, and the abruptness with which you enter an utterly different space is simply confounding. People driving east pause in Wendover to eat, gas up, and gamble away their last spare change before leaving behind legalized gaming—but those are all just excuses to stop and catch your breath when confronted by one of the truly big vistas in the world, sightlines of up to seventy miles being not uncommon. The lake currently averages a surface expanse of just under 2,400 hundred square miles, the Great Salt Lake Desert of western Utah encompassing an additional 4,000 square miles.At its largest extent, the surface of its parent body of water, the Pleistocene Lake Bonneville, was more than nine hundred feet higher than today, and, as mentioned in the introduction, at nearly 20,000 square miles almost as large as Lake Michigan.When its surface elevation reached 5,090 feet some 16,800 years ago and it breached to the north in what is now Idaho to send its waters into the Snake and Columbia river systems, its outflow is estimated to have been 15 million cubic feet per second, some four to five times the discharge rate of the Amazon River. The relict Great Salt Lake remains the largest lake in the Great Basin, roughly seventy-five miles north by south and thirty-five miles wide, though that can vary dramatically during a series of wet El Niño years, its dimensions then exceeding ninety-two miles long by fortyeight miles wide in places. Its contemporary surface fluctuates around 4,200 feet in elevation, relatively stable compared to that of the Aral...