I like lakes, any kind of lake (to paraphrase an old childhood favorite, The Friendly Book)—big lakes, small lakes, deep lakes, shallow lakes, lakes surrounded by columnar cliffs, lakes encircled by forested mists—any kind of lake. On a trip, I tend to study a map and perk up at the sight of an approaching lake hugging whatever highway we are on. Recently, my husband and I drove to San Diego, taking the less traveled route along US 395. In south-central Oregon, we passed a couple of very strange lakes.
Lake Abert from Abert Rim, courtesy US Bureau of Land Management
Alkali, white lake of the dotted line
On the map, Alkali Lake appeared as a squat gray-blue triangle inside a much larger triangle of white bordered by a dotted line. Arriving within the dotted line, we crossed a causeway overlooking bone-colored sand, isolated tufts of hardy green shrubs, and, in the distance, brown mountains. In a surrealistic touch, two travelers had set up lounge chairs in the sand, as if waiting for an ocean. So: dotted lines around white on a map indicate lakes that have dried up, and there are a dozen of them in the high desert of southeastern Oregon.
Abert Lake
After Alkali, the highway climbed Hogback Summit, then descended and curved, opening onto a breathtaking view of silvery water and dark swoops of bluffs. Abert Rim, as the bluffs are known, is a thirty-mile-long escarpment that rises 2,500 feet above the lake of the same name. As we approached Abert Lake, its vastness—an elongated triangle some fifteen miles long and seven miles at the widest, approximately 57 square miles—became apparent. Yet it did not look ‘normal.’ The blue was pale and cloudy, and tended toward gray near shore. It seemed a ghost of a lake, without boats or paddle boards, becalmed in time.
Here are a few facts: Abert is a pluvial lake, meaning it is closed and receives new water primarily from rainfall. Its average depth is scarcely seven feet. Because it has no outlet, evaporating water leaves strong residues of carbonate salts, making the lake strongly alkaline and turning rocks and other objects white. Fish cannot survive in these conditions, but the lake is a mecca for brine shrimp and alkali flies, and for the shorebirds that eat them. In 1843 the explorer John Fremont, searching for a mythical river, led a party to the edge of the lake and the rim. Perhaps judiciously, he named the two sites for his boss, Colonel J.J. Abert.
Ancient Lake Chewaucan
Courtesy US Bureau of Land Management
Abert Lake was not always so ghostly. At the end of the Pleistocene Epoch, some 12,000 years ago, it formed part of the ancient Lake Chewaucan. Created by melting glaciers and unmovable escarpments such as Abert Rim, which itself began to form several million years earlier, Chewaucan covered 480 square miles and reached depths of 375 feet. Archaeologists have discovered remains of human habitation along the lake during that time. Over the millennia, the water dried up, until all that is left today are the shallow alkaline lakes of Abert and Summer, which are managed by the US Bureau of Land Management.
The mysterious shrinking of Lake Abert
In recent years, Lake Abert has been shrinking much faster than normal. By 2014, it had virtually dried up, dropping to an average depth of two feet. The salinity shot up to 25% (the ocean is 3.5%), too much even for the brine shrimp, used as food for industrial shrimp farming. No brine shrimp meant no shorebirds. Abert hadn’t been so dry since the catastrophic Dust Bowl droughts of the 1930s, yet there were no current droughts of that magnitude. So why was the lake shrinking? Two newspapers, The Oregonian of Portland and Ogden, Utah’s Standard-Examiner, investigated the mystery. Part of the problem, they deduced, lay with increasing water use by farmers, ranchers, and a fish restoration project. Fortunately, with the large snowpack of 2016, Abert Lake has recovered somewhat, but its future is far from certain. Though hidden away in Oregon’s outback, this is the largest saltwater lake in the Pacific Northwest. As Abert goes, so goes Utah’s Great Salt Lake, which is thirty times larger. Will these shallow alkaline lakes become dry lakes of the dotted lines in the future?
Coffeepot Lake
Big lakes, small lakes, deep lakes, shallow lakes, lakes that are salty and shrinking in size, lakes that are dry but geologically prized—I like lakes. But I do hope the wet ones remain wet!