The 1936 Drought Exposed a Nevada Lakebed — A Row of Doorways Dried in the Mud, All Facing One Way

The summer of 1936 was dry in western Nevada in a way the old men who remembered the drought of the early 1900s admitted they had never seen. The rain did not come in the spring, and it had not come the winter before, and a shallow desert lake in a valley northeast of Walker Lake — one of those lakes that shrinks at the edges every year and fills again by March — did not fill at all that year. It pulled back all summer, uncovering ring after ring of cracked bottom, and by August the water was a puddle in the middle of a mile of grey dried mud, broken into plates you could walk across like a shattered pavement