alkali flat

When I was overcome with exhaustion, my sway morphing into a semi-conscious stupor, I knew it was time to go — the only thing separating me from my air mattress being a vast alkali flat.

The footprints were formed in soft mud on the margins of a shallow lake which now forms part of Alkali Flat in White Sands.

As an alkali flat, there is nothing to burn and nothing to break.

Centuries of evaporation have transformed this ancient lake bed into a dry alkali flat, inhabited today by a migratory roost of 30,000 sandhill cranes.

The weeklong Burning Man festival takes place once a year over Labor Day weekend in a remote alkali flat in northwestern Nevada.