It looks like snow, but it's not!  Piles of salt surround an evaporation pond* in the valley near Glendale, Arizona.  A large commercial operation here mines the salt hydraulically from hundreds of feet below the desert.
   The salt is what's left of a large lake that occupied this part of Arizona during the , when a series of lakes existed in other parts of the Southwest as well -- water trapped in valleys broken up by faulting during a wetter period in the Earth's history.
   * photo by Richard Allen; used with company permission.
 
   See the GeoHistory page if you want to know more about why the landscape looks the way it does, or return to the map of "The Rocks of the Valley of the Sun" for more view locations.
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