Black Friday on a White Lake

We avoided the stores this Black Friday by heading to the hinterland for some fresh air and exercise.  We walked around a dry salt lake bed near Muleshoe, Texas, and i took photos of the terrain.  Honey yellow crystals (gypsum, i think?) are very plentiful in some areas about this lake, and i tried to capture them with some ground level shots.

In years when the lake has water in it, thousands of sandhill cranes can be seen here.  The surface of the lake bed was white as snow with the salts that have leached out of the ground.  Gasses that had formed just under the soil surface while it was still moist had buckled up the top centimeter or so of the bed into intricate folds.

Maybe one of these years it will rain again and this will all be under water and cranes.

Buffalo Lake Hike

It has been about ten years since we've been here and the water was getting low then. In the 1950's Buffalo Lake, in the Texas panhandle, was a busy little lake complete with cabins and fishing derbys. But playa lakes come and go depending on rainfall The '50's must have been moist times, and maybe the cabin-constuction era was wishful thinking. In any case, the cabins are long gone and the drying trend on the high plains continues. Today Buffalo Lake is a grass-covered depression (first photo).

We had a pleasant afternoon hike around the lake bed and saw mule deer and lots of nice beetles (disclaimer: not my fingernails). We tend to look for beetles everywhere, as my hubby is a coleopterist. The photo with the steps is an old dam, and the other pics of structures are of the sluice gates.