More on the lake in the desert theme...here is a recently completed,
yet preliminary, map of the terminus of the Carson River where it once
spewed through an amazingly complicated array of distributary channels
that fed a terminal lake in the Carson Desert. The lake was a mere
puddle relative to its ancestor, Lake Lahontan, but it was still
probably pretty cool. It certainly shrank and swelled enough to drive
the river crazy as it built a plexus of channels while chasing its
fluctuating shores.

The 24k scale of this map makes it hard to appreciate the complexity
of the varying river-lake interface. Maybe someday we will map the
whole thing in similar detail...actually, remap it, since Roger
Morrison covered most of this ground in the 50s and 60s. We are just
tackling it with better imagery and slightly improved stratigraphy.

Link to a legible pdf: http://www.nbmg.unr.edu/dox/of0912.pdf