Maps That Lie

There's a joke in Discworld based on a truth of cartography, a job I enjoyed when I did it a dozen years ago. "A town with a name as if the map maker had gotten embarrassed at the blank space". This is actually true. There are considerable ghost towns and intersections, many with no houses or buildings at all, which get names on maps because there used to be something there, once, and its a blank spot on the map and the cartographer makes the name bigger than it deserves to be. My buddy "That Guy(tm)" once discovered a planned gas stop at one of these towns was merely a ghost intersection in the middle of nowhere and got the joyful exasperation of gently motoring to the next real town. Always check for services when vacation planning. A mere name may just be a ghost town.

Lake Tecopa Playa
Near Death Valley

Another quirk of cartography is in the Great Basin, all dry lakes are shown full at their maximum extent, regardless of how empty they normally are. Most dry lakes in the Great Basin, which is the area east of the Sierras and west of the Rockies, north of Los Angeles and the Colorado River and East of the Cascades and Seattle, that huge desert in rain shadow, most of that is dry lakes a few crucial rivers running through them, or worse running into the basin and dying on a salt pan. The lakes displayed are usually a few inches deep. At maximum a foot deep. These are places that once had quite a few migratory birds like ducks, but also pelicans and flamingoes. I personally found a dead and mummified flamingo in the desert near Death Valley. Geese used to pass through there, back when there was more summer rain, like you get from hurricanes off of western Mexico. We're getting that weather this summer, btw. Its still hot as hell, but the clouds drifting up into Nevada are raining and thundering on the other side of the Sierras, and putting rain on those dry lake beds.

When the climate changes back to glacial cycle, the lakes will refill. Lake Lahontan, with its enormous extent and hundreds of miles of shoreline and coves is ideal for fishing vacations and boat rentals and a railroad that serves the tourists with stops at the various villages and resorts will be one of the finest in the world. And civilized! Just look at all that shoreline. That lake covers a fourth of the state. And Bonneville is another fourth.

Adding water sources to the Great Basin which can evaporate drastically changes them. The mountains block coastal moisture, forcing the clouds up and up and when the air comes down the east side, it comes down dry and hot from Adiabatic Heating Effect. The entire Great Basin is basically a Banana Belt 300 miles wide thanks to prevailing West winds and the Sierras and Cascades. You change that with South Winds and thunderstorms from Hurricanes. Suddenly the new moisture makes almost daily thunderclouds, lightning, and rain, and its drastically changed that climate back to what it was like during the ice age, or closer anyway. I would love to see us import water and refill Lake Lahontan and the other Pleistocene lakes of Nevada, like Lake Bonneville. I would totally go bass fishing there, or shoot geese and eat them with orange sauce or BBQ. I've never had smoked goose.

The big lake in central California is Kern Lake. That WILL refill because the farms put over its sediments fail thanks to a trick of limestone and water in arid environments. It turns out that the limestone hardens when flooded and turns into concrete, called Caliche. Its feet thick and even punching holes through it only works a short time, since the sediment flows back into the holes and plugs it again. This means the fields won't drain. Plants mostly require good drainage. I suppose you could grow rice there, but they already feed the world with the big rice farms around Marysville, far to the north. In any case, the above map shows you all those wonderful lakes, some of them deep. Death Valley used to be 600 feet deep and was called Lake Manly. Owens Lake was bigger. Hell, I remember seeing it in a wet year, a few inches deep but full from side to side. LA fixed that up, draining it again and sending the salt water to LA residents. There's a city that needs to empty, or pay for a desalination plant or ten. The Great Basin drastically changes with water supplies. There are way more trees, grass, and the sage isn't natural. That got imported accidentally and pretty much took over. It is supposed to be Tallgrass Prairie. I've seen examples. Same as the stuff outside Chicago and across the Great Plains.

Notice how tall tallgrass is? The entire state of Nevada was a mix of this, cottonwoods, juniper trees, wild flowers, cypress, and bristlecone pine forests. Not sagebrush with cottonwoods along the creeks and junipers on the shaded sides of the mountains. It was very different. The lakes and the storms that filled them where the difference. I hope to see those lakes refill in my lifetime. I would like that a lot.