During these many months of heavy rain & thick snowdrifts, we look around the southwest and notice all those playas, those alkaline dry lakes, blessed with a sheen of fresh water . . . and we remember this used to be a land of lakes, not so long ago.

As the last Ice Age came to a close, some 12,000 years ago, immense freshwater lakes covered much of what we now call California and Nevada. What a paradise it must’ve been, with people living in pleasant villages on the shorelines, lots of big game for food and fur and leather, everybody zipping around in tule boats made of our famous marshy bullrushes, this was true from the Great Salt Lake to the middle of Nevada to the long valleys on either side of the great mountain ranges.

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