It is the only absolute desert in North America, a four-hundred-square-mile dry lake bed so desolate that nothing ever grows there. Vast and featureless, Nevada's Black Rock Desert defies visual measurement much to the consternation of off-roaders who venture out onto this playa only to run out of gas before reaching the other side. It is the largest flat area on the continent, where the sound barrier was broken in a car. And it is a place of total silence not even birds or insects live here except when thousands of humans congregate for the Burning Man Festival on Labor Day weekend....

High on the Colorado Plateau lies a uniquely magical desert place: a land of sandy mesas and slickrock escarpments, an elegant maze of vertical-walled, vertigo-inspiring canyons plunging to darkened depths. Cedar Mesa, Utah, is a place frozen in time. A land that can only be adequately explored on foot or horseback, Cedar Mesa offers adventurous visitors magnificent examples of all the topographic and geologic wonders that define "canyon country" throughout the Southwest: stone arches, natural bridges, and breath-sucking precipices, plus hidden springs, hanging gardens, and a treasure...

For many, these mountains represent the Apache stronghold of Geronimo. For others, they are a birdwatcher's paradise. But the Chiricahua Mountains of southeastern Arizona are more than this. They are a classic "sky island" of the desert, a rich storehouse of biologic diversity. On a journey undertaken in search of a pair of rare short-tailed hawks, Ken Lamberton takes readers on an excursion through these mountains, from their riparian canyons to their highest peaks. The Chiricahuas comprise the largest single range in southern Arizona, crisscrossed by more than 300 miles of trails....

In a subtle dance of arid solitude, two southern California deserts come together at Joshua Tree National Park. One is the Colorado Desert--an extension of the Sonoran Desert--and features natural gardens of ocotillo and cholla cactus. The other end of the park engages the Mojave Desert, the special habitat of the Joshua tree as well as some of the most interesting geologic displays found anywhere. After the area became a national monument in 1936, local and regional residents were the primary visitors. As Southern California grew so did park visitation; Joshua Tree now lies within a...

The desert country along the Columbia River is one of the West s least-known desert places one that most people don t even drive through unless they are unusually curious travelers. The Hanford Reach is the last free stretch of the river between the McNary and Priest Rapids Dams, a place boasting a varied landscape of floodplains, wetlands, deserts, orchards and nuclear reactors. This is not a place that people think to visit. Known primarily for hosting the country s most toxic nuclear outpost, it is public land that barely exists in public consciousness. But because the Reach has...

Deep in the heart of the Sonoran Desert lies an oasis of ebony mountains, golden poppies, stately saguaros and the organ pipe cactus, "a prickly octopus turned on its head."
A terrain where one learns to pay attention to the details: the tracks of a sidewinder in the sand, the tiny eggs of a cactus wren, the flash of a vermilion flycatcher against the azure sky.
Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument lies in southwestern Arizona on the Mexican border. It is an isolated park that for Carol Ann Bassett has long been a place of solitude a silent refuge where she often camped out...

It is a high valley edged by serrated peaks, a remote expanse the size of Connecticut lying, as if forgotten, between two mountain ranges. Here, North America's tallest sand dunes blow against glacier-gouged summits, the Rio Grande begins its long journey from snowflake to saltwater, and vast reaches of desert scrub hide verdant pocket wetlands. Colorado's San Luis Valley is not a place for the timid. Sizzling hot in summer, frigid cold in winter, this huge landscape is humbling in its openness, a place defined by the rhythms of nature--and by the thrust and parry of male courting...

Over a hundred million years ago, the area that is now Dinosaur National Monument attracted the behemoth creatures of its namesake with its plentiful supply of food and water. Renowned for its world- famous fossil quarry, Dinosaur National Monument is also home to two of the West's legendary whitewater rivers: the Yampa and the Green. In this new addition to the Desert Places series, river runner and author Hal Crimmel, along with photographer Steve Gaffney, invite readers to partake in the beauty of Dinosaur National Monument's remote, rapids-filled canyons, and wonder at the unique...

"There is nothing out there." Such is the claim, at least, of politicians and oil company executives, amazed that anyone would fight to protect the miles of plateaus and canyon bottoms that stretch across southern Utah. Even tourists see this region as an empty spot on the map--an excuse to drive directly from Capitol Reef to Arches National Park. But it is precisely this--nothing--that writer Brooke Williams and photographer Chris Noble find captivating about Escalante. In this thoughtful and exquisitely illustrated rumination, the authors tour the network of chasms and gorges that began...

Zion National Park has served as the stage set for more than twenty-five movies, including, most notably, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It is also a popular tourist destination, boasting a visitor log of more than 2.5 million every year. During the summer months, tour buses rattle their way into the park almost hourly. Sightseers crowd polished-trestle-wood and river-rock inns, buy hand-woven bags imported from Guatemala, and sip icy margaritas from the porch of an old bar with a stunning view of irrigated Mexican primroses and glowing redrock cliffs. While Zion National Park is a...