hard-baked

The sun was a merciless yellow eye glaring down at a landscape of rock, hard-baked Earth, the hardiest of scrub brushes and the most stubborn of life-forms.

Starcraft II: Devils’ Due Christie Golden 2011

The sun was a merciless yellow eye glaring down at a landscape of rock, hard-baked Earth, the hardiest of scrub brushes and the most stubborn of life-forms.

Starcraft II: Devils’ Due Christie Golden 2011

In the summer the yard was hard-baked dirt, cracked into jigsaw patterns, and in the winter it was dark with mud and cold with frost.

Blood Men Paul Cleave 2010

In the summer the yard was hard-baked dirt, cracked into jigsaw patterns, and in the winter it was dark with mud and cold with frost.

Blood Men Paul Cleave 2010

Soon only patches of dried grass, cactus, Texas persimmon, and scruffy mesquite punctuate the vast sweep of hard-baked red dirt.

One Big Table Molly O’Neill 2010

Her hard-baked shoes were slippery, and her sodden knapsack seemed to weigh a ton.

Scott Westerfeld: Uglies Quartet Scott Westerfeld 2010

Ella had heard on the radio that morning that rainfall amounts were barely measurable and that what little rain there had been had fallen so quickly that it ran off before it could soak into the hard-baked ground.

Rainwater Sandra Brown 2009

The top screen shot, which led the on-line edition in the early afternoon, framed Obama's first political appointee, Rahm Emanuel (as well as Obama himself) as overly hard-baked, conniving and conspiratorial (even though their story yesterday emphasized how much Emanuel has smoothed out the rough edges over the years).

Michael Shaw: Reading The Pictures: First Visual Swipe At Obama Administration 2008

It seemed an unforgiving landscape, cactus and sage and hard-baked desert ground.

The Triangle Conspiracy David Kent 2006

It seemed an unforgiving landscape, cactus and sage and hard-baked desert ground.

The Triangle Conspiracy David Kent 2006