Soda Lake: A Vanished Inland Sea
Near Zzyzx, California
Stretch your eyes north and west from Zzyzx and you look out across Soda Lake, a vast, blinding white plain that is almost never actually a lake. It is a dry lakebed, a playa, sitting at the very end of the Mojave River. For most of the year the river never reaches it.
The water sinks underground and travels the last miles unseen, surfacing only at springs like the ones here. Soda Lake was not always dry. During the last ice age, this basin held a genuine body of water known as Lake Mojave, part of a chain of ancient lakes fed by wetter, cooler times.
As the climate warmed and dried, that inland sea evaporated away, leaving behind Soda Lake and its neighbor Silver Lake to the north. What the vanished water left behind is written on the ground itself. The playa is crusted with alkaline salts, compounds related to the ones people call soda and baking soda.
That crust gave Soda Springs and Soda Lake their names, and it drew the miners, the railroad, and eventually a radio preacher, all chasing what an evaporated sea had abandoned in the sand.
