Looking north from a couple of miles south of the abandoned railroad watering stop of Jungo. Last year at this time, this lake bed had been flooded by a series of late spring storms. Not this year! The well-defined horizontal line on the mountain in the middle distance, about a third of the way up, is a shoreline from Pleistocene Lake Lahontan. This area was a lot wetter then! ;)

As I've mentioned elsewhere, "playa" is literally "beach" in Spanish, but is also used for a dry lake bed in the southwestern US. Presumably it's a Mexican-Spanish loanword. Unlike "canyon" (cañón), another Southwesternism of Spanish origin, it hasn't apparently made the transition to international English.