Soap Lake #club100

Driving the backroads of Washington state will lead you to some interesting spots. One of these places is Soap Lake.

I had never heard of Soap Lake before, and frankly, I am surprised that more people haven't. The lake got its name due to its high mineral content, which used to cause a thick, white, soapy foam on the surface of the water. I say used to because the mineral content of the lake has declined over the past decades. Due to the construction of several canals linking Soap Lake to freshwater lakes, many of the minerals, and the capacity to create foam, have been diluted and washed away. Still, it is possible for foam to form on windy days.

Soap Lake is meromictic lake, which means there are layers of water within the lake that do not mix. There are not many lakes where the water layers never mix, but other examples are Great Salt Lake and the Black Sea.

Soap lake is extra special because it contains the highest diversity of minerals (23 different ones) than any other lake in the world. It also contains ammonium bituminosulphonate (also known as Ichthyol). This substance is a black ointment that has long been used to treat skin disorders such as eczema and psoriasis. For that reason, people have come to bathe in this lake for centuries, even millennia, as Indigenous peoples have traditionally considered Soap Lake to have medicinal properties.

Here you can see a number of tourists enjoying Soap Lake. They slather themselves with mud and then rinse off in the briny water. The water is quite shallow and you must walk quite a ways before the water becomes deep enough to swim. The bathers seem to be walking on the surface of the water.

Surprisingly, this special lake remains under developed in terms of commercial tourism. I would have expected that there would at least be a spa hotel in the vicinity. Instead, the area appears rather economically depressed.

Have you swam in a meromictic lake before? Did you like it?

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