Spearville ? Lowell Aberson, a Kansas Wildlife & Parks biologist, was walking across the bottom of Hain State Fishing Lake.

Except for a shrinking pool of water in the center, dry inch-wide cracks covered the lake bed’s 53 acres. It looked like a giant jigsaw puzzle.

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A foot-long, bloated catfish lay rotting in the hot sun after being dragged from the shallow water by one of a dozen or so Canada geese, turkey vultures and great Blue Herons watching for a meal.

The smell of the dead fish in the 100-degree heat inspired Aberson to move upwind.

“Believe it or not, this lake is normally a half-mile long and a quarter-mile wide,” he said.

Fifty-eight drought-stricken Kansas counties have been declared federal disaster areas. Kansas Gov. Bill Graves has put the losses to the state agriculture economy at hundreds of millions of dollars.And the drought persists.Journal-World senior editor Bill Snead spent six days recently visiting areas of Kansas hit hardest by lingering drought. He covered nearly 1,600 miles and interviewed farmers and ranchers, merchants, local officials, retirees and people from many walks of life who’ve been living with extreme heat and very little moisture.The result is “Parched Prairie,” the series that continues today.

Stories¢Part 1: Seeking Salvation from the Drought

He pointed to a dry spot below the shoreline, covered with weeds.

“Used to put my boat in there to do fish counts,” Aberson said. “We had over 50 days last year when the temperatures were over a hundred, and we’ve had more than 50 days of the same this year. On days like that you can count on an inch of water evaporating. Doesn’t take that long to lose 6 feet of water.”

Hodgeman County has had fewer than 8 inches of precipitation this year. Last year it received less than half the 22-inch annual average.

Lakes, streams disappear

With no runoff to replenish it in recent years, Hain is simply disappearing. Aberson, who has been with the Dodge City Office of Wildlife & Parks since 1994, said it was the first time he’d seen the lake dry.

Like it, other lakes and streams in western Kansas are showing the lingering effects of the drought gripping western Kansas. Less apparent are the dropping groundwater levels, under heavy demand this summer from irrigators trying to salvage their withering crops.

Windbreaks, some established decades ago by early settlers, are losing their oldest and youngest trees. Hundreds of thousands of tree seedlings planted through conservation programs in the past five years are dying.

The drought is causing wind erosion, reducing soil fertility and further depleting native grasslands, state conservationists say.

“You don’t ever recover from something like that, you just manage,” said Bud Davis, conservation agronomist with the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service in Salina. “Most of the cropland is already in an eroded state. … After being tilled, it lost most of the good stuff. What we see now is a continuation of the degradation.”

Another dry lake

Near Jetmore, there’s another lake that once was more than twice the size of Hain, and now nearly as dry. The Hodgeman County Wildlife area was the oasis where area residents once played on their Jetskis and went to swim.

Now, the boat ramp is 70 yards from the dry lake bed and the swimming platform is suspended 10 feet in the air.

Before the drought, half of the fish in southwest Kansas swam in the lake. Unless a large amount of rain comes soon, they’ll all die.

“We’ve opened both of these lakes to public salvage where people can catch as many fish as they want in nets or by hand,” Aberson said. “There are thousands of fish involved, but to salvage them in all of this silt and mud would be labor intensive and … we have no place to put them.”

He said the lakes would be restocked after they get a big “shot of water.”

Rivers and streams, too, are drying up.

Average daily stream flows in Kansas are still down, according to last week’s state drought report, with 40 percent of the 106 gauging stations reporting water flows below normal.

The extreme drought conditions in northwest Kansas have resulted in significant declines in reservoir levels with Keith Sebelius, Kirwin and Webster lakes all 12 to 13 feet below normal levels.

In July, Gov. Bill Graves protested releases from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from Milford, Tuttle Creek and Perry lakes to bolster downstream navigation on the Missouri River. Those lakes are now 4 or 5 feet below normal.

Feeding livestock

In Stafford County, Rattlesnake Creek was barely a trickle as it wiggled under U.S. Highway 50, its bottom green with algae. Nearby ponds were dry. Parched fields bordering the highway were filled with slumping rows of corn. The crop’s white leaves, sun bleached and brittle, leaned toward the ground like they’d given up the ghost or seen one. Their neighbors were acres of knee-high milo and stunted soybean plants.

Huge stacks of alfalfa, alongside U.S. 50 at Lewis, 45 miles east of Dodge City, were a refreshing sight in the heat of the day.

“Right now we’re in pretty good shape,” said Lagayle Putter, manager of Star Alfalfa, “But by October I think it’ll get crazy.”

Star Alfalfa sells hay to cattlemen, farmers and feedlots. Most cattle owners who had to pull livestock off burned-up pastures now are feeding them hay set aside for the coming winter. When that’s gone and with no new alfalfa or grass of their own and meager corn and milo crops to supplement winter feed, the price of hay probably will be driven even higher.

“The cost of hay has already doubled, and good grades have nearly tripled since last year,” Putter said.

She talked about one of their hay producers who farms in Edwards County, south of Great Bend. He made his third cutting on 130 acres of irrigated land where he generally gets from 250 to 300 bales an acre.

Instead, “He got 50 … 50 bales an acre because he ran out of water,” she said. “All that heat just saps the life out of it. Even if you’ve got water, the hay gets cooked.”

Barren fields

Many of the fields around Spearville, 15 miles east of Dodge City, were barren. They looked about as fertile as a dirt race track, and about the same color.

A big yellow plastic sign, the kind you might see by the roadside pointing to a “Mattress World” grand opening, was parked on the main street, next to Spearville’s Police Department. It told residents to conserve water and wet their lawns only between 7 p.m and 10 a.m.

During July, Dodge City residents used 10 million gallons of water a day, the highest usage on record for any month, any year.

The bone-dry, sandy bottom of the Arkansas River that sometimes runs through Dodge was littered with tire tracks and brown weeds.

It was a little after 9 a.m., and the costumed employees in Dodge City’s Boot Hill Museum were doing their chores early to beat the heat

Sarah Trabert, 17, was washing windows at Rath’s General Store, next to the fabled Long Branch Saloon. Her boss and chief curator of the museum, Cassie Sanko, stopped to chat.

“It’s a shock for the tourists who’ve been riding in their air-conditioned cars when they pull up to the museum and step out into our 102 degree heat,” Sanko said. “One day it was 110 degrees. They usually head straight for their motel rooms and come back later in the day.”