The water on the southern edge of The Tengger also reminds me of its northern rim. It is said that there was once a large "Qingyu Lake" in the depths of Tengger, and only experts know whether it is connected to the Yellow River or an independent lake. Legend has it that throughout Tengri, as many stars as you can see on the canopy, there will be as many lakes as there are on the ground. Some are famous, some are nameless, and Moon Lake is a new lake name that has appeared in the past ten years, a bit like the sand lake in Shizuishan, Ningxia, which suddenly spread its reputation and became a grand scene.
The name of Moon Lake is both transfiguration and spiritual. In the desert, the lake water tends to form on the leeward side of the dune, the sand dunes are crescent-shaped, and the lake water is naturally crescent-shaped. The most famous is the crescent spring in Dunhuang. However, the Moon Lake in Alxa is not a slender crescent, it is also half a moon when the lake is small, and when the lake is more, it is close to a round of bright moon. This may be related to the terrain, but also because there is a spring at the bottom of the lake, and the water continues to gush out from the depths of the desert, forming the depth and tension of the lake itself, according to her own wishes, performing her yin and yang.
↑ Tengri Desert Moon Lake scenery. (Visual China)
The name of Moon Lake is the name of its development operator Song Jun, and no one can call the original name. Song Jun is an entrepreneur friend I knew early on, a native of Hefei, Anhui Province, who graduated from Jiangxi University of Technology. Perhaps because he was related to the Gobi, as soon as he arrived at the lake in the desert, he couldn't help but go underground to the "sea". He said it was another water world, and something had to be done here. He ran half the Gobi alone, saw the sothor forest, and then looked at the reeds in the desert lake, walked around, rode a camel into a sparsely populated desert, and froze in front of the glowing lake. He returned to Beijing and raised money everywhere to build a desert recreation park there that had never existed before. I thought he was just talking on a whim, but it was really built. Tourists flock to the desert and become a living advertising and tourism business development entity for desert leisure.
When the camp started, I stumbled on other things and did not go, but I could not resist curiosity and the warm invitation of song jun, and then ran upside down. This Moon Lake is indeed a little different from the lake I saw, like climbing up at half a moon. Looking down from the high sand peaks, there are curved sand dunes on all sides, but the west and east sides are highly asymmetrical, and such an asymmetry creates a shallow arc of Moon Lake, allowing her to stretch her soft limbs towards the light green reed beach.
Entering the camp gate, there was a sand plant herbarium, and many of the strangely shaped poplar, barracuda and sand date trunks they found from the desert were all dead woods. It is common sense that there are flowers and grasses in the leisure garden, so why make such a bridge section? I guess that means, don't forget how the trees withered. Water is the source of life, if you don't care about this source of life, you can't protect this bright moon-like lake, and eventually it will wither and disappear like dead wood.
What is the paste on the wall of this hall, touched and touched, not the diatom mud on the market, but the fossils of reeds and shells. This is a divine stroke of local material, which is tantamount to telling people that this moon lake has a predecessor and an afterlife. In more ancient times, this Tengger Desert may be the white jade lake, full of lakes and wetlands, full of green reeds and brown lake mussels, and there will be no shortage of fish. But they are extinct, the remains are everywhere, accompanied by yellow sand, and it is difficult to find their traces. I know that desert water is often buried deep underground by yellow sand, where large lakes and seas are submerged. According to expert estimates, close to the Ulan Bu and desert on the west bank of the Yellow River, there is a 100-meter aquifer under the desert, with water reserves of 5.7 billion cubic meters. The Badain Jaran Desert, which is adjacent to the Tengger Desert, is even more peculiar, with 113 haizi. At the edge of a saltwater lake called Miaohaizi, there is a spring with a thick bowl mouth. There is a column of water in that lake that is the size of a washbasin " Baotu Spring" ( Baotu Spring " . There is also a "Millstone Spring", and the water actually appears in the eyes of a stone. Some professional researchers have concluded that there is a river network under the Badain Jaran Desert, and the water of the river network comes from the snowmelt and ice melting of the Qilian Mountains.
↑ Red alkali in Shenmu City, Shaanxi Province. Photo by Liu Xiao (Xinhua News Agency)
Life is tenacious, the water of life is more tenacious, they will always find their own home under the dunes. From time to time, they will protrude from the bottom of the desert, open their eyes, and spy on the world, and these large and small desert lakes are their bright eyes and slightly exposed teeth.
At Moon Lake, I stepped on the wooden boardwalk that stretched out in the reeds on the shore of the lake, and the water in front of me was blue, and the edge of the opposite shore seemed to have a white stone lake foundation, and the shore was a green grass beach, and it was a long way before I saw sand dunes and cruising camels. If the water is larger and the lake floods over the grass beach, the lake must be a "full moon", which is better compared with the bright moon in the sky.
The road into Moon Lake is a "road" with continuous sand peaks. Out of nowhere, they found a dozen old jeeps and let people taste the thrill of climbing high and low on the desert road. Such ideas have also been seen in the sand slope head. Desert off-roading often brings great stimulation to the mood, and there is no chance of heart disease. One desert camp after another appeared by the desert lake, and the trainers picked up some dried cow dung and dead branches along the way, and then set up a picnic with three stones, opened their own bottles of water, boiled soup soup, boiled noodles, and cooked noodles, that is a beautiful dinner.
However, what makes me unforgettable is the life in the desert lake, in addition to the spring grass buds that do not make a sound, there are more singing water birds, some can be called, some can not be called. For example, there is a lake in the northern part of the Badain Jaran Desert, and there are 8 stupas by the lake, called the Darikon Temple. But the Asakusa Lake next to the temple is even more appealing. It was early spring, the reeds had not yet budded, the green grass by the lake was sticking out, there was a sound of water birds on the ground, and a gray long-legged bird flashed its wings and rushed over. No one has messed with it, so why lose your temper? It turned out that on the grass stubble less than a meter away from the person, there were two yellow velvet balls rolling, two chicks with slightly red shins. It turned out that the big gray bird thought that someone was going to grab her child, and only then did he make such a move. The man held his breath, the little bird chirped and rolled toward the big bird, and the big bird wowed, as if to rebuke the bird for running wildly, and as if to demonstrate to the intruders, and then took the rolling and climbing bird and walked toward the center of the lake with ice. Since then, I have become interested in wild lakes and wild birds, and every spring, the buds of reeds have just emerged, and I always have to look for whether the same scene will happen again. Because of this interest, I gradually got to know some migratory birds.
In the lakes of the desert, I have seen wild white swans, and I have also seen wild black swans, and green-headed hemp ducks are even less rare. The most strange thing is that I have seen a pair of red-crowned crane cubs, which are earthy yellow, and there is no bright red red red-crowned, so people call it the big earth yellow duck. When he came back to talk to his classmates, he said that he had not seen a red-crowned crane. I said don't be funny, there is no red on the top of the head. He grinned and said don't you know, young red-crowned cranes are earthy yellow with no red on top. Haven't you read Cui Hao's poem "The Yellow Crane Is Gone, the White Clouds Are Empty for a Thousand Years", the young Yellow Crane flew away, and when he grew up, he flew back and became a red-crowned crane. It has changed on its own, but you don't know it. The old saying is "like a yellow crane", this shape variation, the ancients did not understand, Li Bai and Cui Hao did not understand. It's a long sight.
↑ The remains of the red alkali gull. Photo by Tao Ming (Xinhua News Agency)
Since then, I've learned a little more about lakes and life in the desert. Naturally, the wetlands on the Yellow River are not the same as the lakes in the desert, the species of migratory birds are also different, and the biological systems are very different. Some birds prefer to make their home in freshwater wetlands, while others spend the summer in saltwater lakes. Salt lakes are generally older, some closed lakes have less water, fewer outlets, and large evaporation, and year after year, they become salt lake alkali ponds or even glauber salt ponds. Lakes in the desert tend to have a large salt content, and the Yellow River, which has a fresh vein of fresh water, lives peacefully with them, but generally rarely meets. They have a unique appearance, great ornamental value and industrial value. Although the water of the salt lake cannot be drunk by cattle, horses and camels, it has very valuable chemical raw materials. Such lakes are not necessarily temporary for migratory birds to fly long distances, but they also have their own living systems. For example, the Huangyu in Qinghai Lake is a kind of naked fish with few scales, although it belongs to the same family as the Yellow River carp, but it has long been out of the "five clothes". From the Yellow River, that is, 100 kilometers away from the Kelantai Salt Lake, there is a red water weed, and there is a rare brine insect, some people to catch brine insects for the industry, fishing a pound can sell more than 100 yuan. In Qinghai, the Qaidam Basin, which has been greeting the Yellow River from a distance, has a beautiful Chaka Salt Lake, and in the afterglow of the rising sun or the sunset, the rainbow is everywhere, like a peacock opening the screen. Roads are built on the salt lake, and trains run on the salt lake, and they, like the Yellow River, have their own cycle of life, and there are also thousands of changes in spring, summer, autumn and winter.
In the Yellow River bend, including the outer bend, the inner bend and the big few word bends, there are still many such salt lakes, but the scale is not so large. Counting from The Ningdingbian in Shaanxi and the Salt Pond in Ningxia, there is also a red alkali at the junction of Yulin Shenmu and Ordos. Dingbian belongs to the old district, where the 18 lakes, the largest is the Huama Pond, where the big green salt is produced. Legend has it that there were more lakes here, some of which were fresh water, but a flower horse appeared and jumped into the lake, and the ice of the white flowers turned into salt, and the party also had a livelihood. This legend is very beautiful, but I think that their lake water, in addition to coming from the local mountain springs, is most likely from the ancient Yellow River. To the south of Huama pond, there is also an area of 32 square kilometers of red alkali water, with a circumference of 50 kilometers and an average depth of 4 meters, which is the largest natural desert lake in China and a national wetland nature reserve. How it forms has not been studied, but it has seven seasonal rivers infusing, the water quality is brackish, and it is a potential fishing base and the world's largest breeding habitat for the remaining gulls. There are also legends about it, saying that it is the tears of Zhaojun, but it is obviously a different kind of legend like the Sun Moon Mountain and the Backward River in Qinghai. It is as old as the Ordos Terrace. Red Alkali And Huamachi are two pearls scattered in the bends of the Yellow River.
Source: Economic Daily WeChat