The barren expanses of Searles Lake near Death Valley National Park have the look of a psychedelic lunar landscape. It’s a bone white borax flat four times the size of Manhattan, speckled with blood red, ultramarine, and pitch black pools of mineral-saturated brine. Temperatures reach 115 degrees during the summer, with an average of just three inches of rainfall to cool the solar anvil.

Searles Lake is an endorheic dry lake in the Searles Valley of the Mojave Desert, in northwestern San Bernardino County, California. The mining community of Trona is on its western shore. The evaporite basin is approximately long and at its widest point, yielding 1.7 million tons annually of industrial minerals within the basin to the Searles Valley Minerals mining operations. Searles Lake is bounded by the Argus and Slate Mountains.