Arizona Form 120s: Fill & Download for Free

It’s literally a blessing and a curse. I’ve lived in Phoenix all of my life and I have to say Arizona as a state is pretty incredible. Phoenix is hot and in the hottest part of summer temps can reach up to the 120s easily. A short 2 hour drive up north ( Flagstaff) in the winter will bring you to snow and beautiful pine trees! I won’t lie the summer heat sucks but you will know someone who has a pool, there’s tubing ( salt river) , water parks. As a younger person WE DO have a pretty great night life ( mill ave in Tempe and Scottsdale night clubs ). We have beautiful sunsets that I have yet to see any other place including Hawaii that compares to them. Winter is cold( can get below freezing ), however a Phoenicians cold is way different from someone that experiences winter in NY or somewhere else. Oh! And the craziest part about Arizona is That weather can change in a matter of minutes, it can be sunny out then rain in one spot for a few minutes, or raining and then a haboob forms and you’re Stuck in a dust storm. Arizona is an incredible state, and if you want an ocean without a 6 hour drive to Cali, Puerto Penasco is about 4 hours away with way warmer water ! Arizona is one of the only places that does not have to worry about natural disasters ….. except heat stroke and heat exhaustion.

There are several good contenders:There is a spot southeast of San Luis Rio Colorado at the edge of the huge Desierto de Altar dunefield close to the coast, that gets just about an inch of rain per year - less than Death Valley does. The reason for this extreme dryness is the sea wind that carries all moisture further inland where it condenses into summer thunderstorms. The sea wind forms, because the inland desert of Arizona and California is hotter than the air over the Gulf of California. In Winter, not many cold fronts penetrate that far south and the mountain range that forms the backbone of Baja causes drying downsloping winds from the west.On the eastern edge of the Desierto de Altar you get a sense of the vastness and stark emptiness of the “Cruel heart of the Sonoran Desert”. This is North America’s largest sandy desert, the moving dunes cover some 5000 sq miles (12′000 sq km) but the sand-covered area is almost twice as large. The black mountain in the back is dormant Pinacate volcano. Enter at your own risk! The area is protected as a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. Yes, there are “some” plants out here.Another dry spot is found on the “spur” of Central Baja, the peninsula of the Baja peninsula that juts out into the foggy realms of the cold Pacific Ocean. This area is known as the Vizcaíno Desert, it is a subdivision of the Sonoran Desert. This area is similar to the Atacama Desert in Chile, the fog brings in some moisture to allow some plant life - but rain is only occuring when El Niño warms up the ocean and is able to bring in a bit of rain. East Pacific hurricanes quickls decay within hours when they trek over that cold water and the marine layer. Water temperatures off the Spur are just in the mid sixties to low seventies. (18–21 C) Sometimes, entire years pass by without measurable rain.Lifting fog on a lonely stretch of dirt road on the Baja Spur. Occasionally, you can find stands of large yucca plants a bit further inland near Mex 1, but vast stretches of Vizcaino Desert is sand-covered and very sparsely covered in ephemeral residual vegetation.Angel de la Guarda (“Guardian Angel”) Island off of central Baja California on the Gulf side is completely desolate. No fog from the Pacific is reaching the Gulf coast and it is usually far hotter there than on the open Pacific. But the island itself is fairly mild. The surrounding water may be as hot as 94 degrees in late summer - and that is what you experience on the island. Hot still, but nothing compared to inland areas of Baja up north, where you might hit mid 120s. So there is less convection over the “cool” sea, it all occurs over the higher terrain. However, the odd tropical storm that heads up the narrow Gulf may bring some rain to the island, but the downsloping wind from the the peninsular ranges into the tropical low will have a drying, cloud-dissolving effect near the Gulf coast of Baja. There is no weather station on Angel de la Guarda island - but judging from the barren aspect of the rather large island one can take that there is less rain than in Death Valley.A lonely cardón cactus mounts guard on Angel de la Guarda island. It certainly must have a strong guardian angel on its side to still be alive in this rocky realm.Finally, the coastal sections of Sonora State between Bahia de Kino and Puerto Libertad are extremely dry as well. The reason for this coast to be so dry is the same as in the other examples from the Gulf of California - the hotter inland parts of the desert cause a sea breeze to develop that carries all clouds further inland while the cold water out in the open Pacific and the Transpeninsular range of Baja wrings out all moisture that reaches the region from the west. The coast of Sonora is also too far away from the mighty Sierra Madre Occidental, where in the summer, thunderstorms are a daily occurrence. Hermosillo - some 80 miles to the east of the coast on the foothills - therefore gets anywhere from 8 inches near the foothills to less than 5 inches west of the airport per year. The coast itself gets less, still. At the Canal del Infiernillo, between the coast and the large and tall Isla Tiburón you can find a starkly barren stretch of coast similar to Angel de la Guarda:Unreal combination of sapphire colored sea water and the nearly sterile desert near Punta Chueca, Sonora. This area lies immediately east of the tall Tiburón Island, which casts an additional rain shadow. No weather station is operated by the Seri Indians, but judging from the lifeless aspect of the area one can guesstimate the area to receive one inch of rain per year or less. There is a strong current present here - so swim at your own risk. No lifeguard on duty….. But word has it, that this area is an excellent spot to find a good date.“Shark Island” is not really a jungle either! This is Mexico’s largest island and belongs entirely to the Comcaac people, also known as Seri.A bit further north and inland, the desert is a bit more lush - but that green line of cacti is actually a dry creek that drains a nearby mountain range.So what about the mainland away from the coast? One would assume that the further away you move from the coast, the fewer rain-bearing clouds will make it there. Specially considering that the continental part of Mexico up north is broad - and rimmed on both sides by tall and broad mountain ranges.The area of Mexico that is at the greatest distance from either ocean is located in Northern Chihuahua at some 3700 ft above sea level. It is some 650 miles to either coast from there. An enclosed basin, similar to Death Valley, lacking an outlet to the sea. The vast, broad basin certainly looks desolate:Sierra San Miguel, 30 miles west of Villa Ahumada near Ejido Santo Domingo. Cattle ranching is not a good bet out here.One of the largest dry lake bed on the continent (called playa in the U.S. - “laguna” in Mexico, or “barreal”. It covers an area of roughly 80 x 20 miles. On the southern end of this dried up lake you find fabled “Ojo del Diablo” hot spring and adjacent oasis. Laguna de Mayran between Torreón and Saltillo is similar in size and appearance. Other than that, this place is utter desolation, specially during one of the frequent and blinding sandstorms in Spring.Sand and dust is carried by the prevailing westerlies into an area that has several small, elongated mountain ranges near Samalayuca where the sand is dropped, being then constantly shaped and moved into windswept dunes that reach heights of some 500 ft. (150 m)Samalayuca Dunefield is North America’s second largest sandy desert, covering some 1000 sq miles. (2500 km2)But on average, at the driest spot south of Mex 2 around Puerto Paloma this area still receives some 5 inches of rain and snow per year. Most of that falls from isolated thunderstorms in late summer. Temperature-wise, it is some of the more extreme spots: Up to 120 F (49 C) in the summer and down to 0 F (-18 C) during one of the rare arctic outbreak episodes. Any other of the drier spots on the coast above does not get as hot and not nearly as cold as this inland desert. There are long periods of drought here, the longest rainless stretch there during my stay between 1990 and 2011 was 13 months. You never see rainless periods this long in the U.S., mostly because of the fact that the western ranges have a breach, in Arizona as well as over in California, a gateway for rainclouds off of the Pacific. In Mexico, the Transpeninsular Range of Baja, the Sierra Madre Occidental and the Oriental form solid walls that surpasse 10′000 ft (3000 m) in many places. The more southerly location also means that fewer cold fronts make it here - and those that do are weaker, often only bringing in vicious windstorms, enhanced by downsloping.

The desert of the Western U.S. is a very unique place, some of the land forms you will not find anywhere else on earth - other than in nearby Northern Mexico. The deserts of the United States are best described as:being surprisingly diverse in appearancehaving very large altitude changes in relatively short distancesbeing surprisingly empty, people wise. The few large cities do only appear to form an urban landscape.containing a very rich botanical diversity.being the land of the vibrant colors, bright skies and stunning cloud patterns.making up a far larger portion of the U.S. land surface than many people think.The U.S. deserts are divided into 5 smaller units, that can be distinguished even by a casual observer. The differences are owed to altitude, latitude, typical plant species and topography. The five U.S. deserts are called:Great Basin DesertPainted or Slickrock DesertMojave DesertSonoran DesertChihuahuan Desert.(Map according to Mac Mahon, Audubon Society Field Guide “Deserts”. I added the Painted Desert, which was intentionally left out in the field guide. Some authors lump the Painted Desert together with the Great Basin Desert and split off the Baja part of the Sonoran to create yet another North American Desert. However, The Painted Desert has little in common topographically, climate-wise and soil /vegetation makeup, whereas the desert of Baja looks very similar to the coastal Sonoran Desert sections in Sonora, Mexico and shares many plant species).The last two sections are named after the largest states of Mexico, where the bigger parts of those deserts are located. Altogether, these five desert regions of North America make up some 1.5 million square km, roughly half of it is located in the United States, covering close to 10% of its continental landmass. However, the desert regions given above are just those that receive less than 10 inches of yearly precipitation. There are vast expansions of similar-looking terrain that surround the actual deserts, that easily cover another 800′000 to 1′000′000 square kilometers. These areas are classified as semideserts, desert steppe and shortgrass prairie in the U.S. Overall, some 20% of the contiguous U.S. has a desert or semidesert character.The Great Basin Desert is a high-altitude, northern latitude desert, hence the overall climate is rather cold. Summer highs are still torrid, but not extreme, whereas winters are severe. Most rainfall occurs in the cold season, quite a bit in the form of snow. The name indicates that most areas of that desert lack an outlet to the sea, streams and a few small rivers end “blind” in usually dry, desiccated lake beds, but a few permanent lakes such as Great Salt Lake still exist. Yearly precipitation amounts vary between 4 inches at the very driest spots bordering the Mojave Desert to some 10 inches in the northern and higher elevation sites.The Painted Desert is often lumped together with the Great Basin. But it has a bi-seasonal precipitation pattern, as any summer traveller confronting sudden flash floods in the slickrock desert can confirm. It can also get quite a bit hotter here than in the wide-open, windswept Great Basin. Instead of the unique fabric of Basin&Range, where large enlosed basins are rimmed by steep, short, individual ranges you find the only slightly northward tilting Colorado Plateau as the main building block. There is a well-established and deeply incised drainage system via the Colorado River, it does not lack an outlet to the sea, hence it’s not a basin. The Painted Desert offers very different visuals. It’s the Land of the Canyons, a Rock Playground, or one of those weird dreams of Salador Dalí. Vibrant reds, radiant blues, difficult to access and travel in - and difficult to leave once you get hooked. In an average year, you can expect 5–8 inches of precipitation, with great variations from one year to the next.The Mojave Desert is the smallest of the five - and the best known! Hollywood movie directors went there to shoot desert sceneries, as it begins virtually at the L.A. city limits. In California, it is called the High Desert, as it is located mostly at or above 2000 ft (600 m) but it also contains the lowest spot of the continent. (Death Valley) Large swaths look similar to the Great Basin, lacking an outlet to the sea with vast, sweeping basins bordered by low, barren ranges. Vegetation overall is very scant to virtually absent, reflecting the overall very low rainfall and high temperatures, as its latitude is quite southerly. However, winter nights are still freezing cold, even summer nights can become crisp in the higher realms of this fascinating desert. Most if not all precipitation arrives in winter as little as it might be - only some 2–4 inches in most parts.The low-altitude-southern latitude Sonoran Desert is the warmest desert overall not only in the U.S. but in North America as a whole. Areas in Southwestern Arizona, southeastern California and adjacent Sonora will not see freezing nighttime temperatures at all, not even in winter. Daytime highs are mild, balmy to downright warm, ideally suited for some January golf or tennis. You pay for such amenities when May arrives, as the heat will be relentless - and from July onward it won’t be a dry heat either, and neither will it cool off at night. The hottest, driest part of the Sonoran Desert near the Colorado River rivals Death Valley in barrenness and desolation, but the further east you go the higher the land rises - and the fuller the rain gauges become. Summer rainfall amounts to about 1/3 of the yearly allowance, the remainder should arrive between October and March - but frequently fails to do so. Occasional hurricane remnants from the Gulf of California make up for the rainfall deficits. The hallmark of the Sonoran Desert is a plant often used to symbolize all of the U.S. deserts and most of Mexico. The Saguaro Cactus. But it actually grows nowhere else on earth than in the Sonoran Desert - but not in California - and neither on Baja. Yearly precipitation amounts to barely 2 inches along the Colorado River and Imperial Valley to a bit above 11 inches in the higher terrain east of Tucson, marking a transition zone.Finally, the unwanted step-child of the U.S. deserts, the Chihuahuan Desert! Probably the youngest of the five, it is still rapidly evolving and drying out. 400 years ago, conquistadors on their way north from Mexico City into New Mexico were talking about their horses wading through grasses so tall, that they would touch their bellies, and proud, fabulously wealthy Mexican cattle ranchers would answer the demand of 50′000 head from U.S. buyers with the question “Which color?”Topographically, it is a land of high altitude, similar to the Great Basin, with which it shares a similar fabric of large, open basins and barren, impressive-looking ranges, known to geologists as Basin&Range Province. The basins used to contain large, shallow lakes that still show up on old maps from the 1950s. These days, the vast, vibrant blues in some of the basins are just great examples of true desert mirages. Large areas lack an outlet to the sea, but the fabled Rio Grande and its main tributary, the Rio Conchos out of Chihuahua managed to cut through these boundaries by means of several spectacular canyons, marking the U.S.-Mexico border. Unfortunately, the proud river is currently losing its battle against the drying out of the region, only the empty riverbed is marking the border between El Paso and Presidio.The Chihuahuan is also the southernmost U.S. desert, as areas of the Big Bend in Texas are not that far from the Tropic of Cancer. Fabulously rich in all types of cacti - but despite these occurring in Texas, none of the species here are particularly big. Climate-wise, the U.S. portion of the Chihuahuan ist the most extreme of all deserts, where winters can feature arctic cold down to -5 F every few decades - and summers can get as hot as anywhere, close to 120 F. Rainfall is a typical summer phenomenon, it comes as a few but occasionally severe thunderstorms that can linger all night. A land of limitless horizons, occasionally you can see thunderheads at 200 miles in the distance, specially at night.The slow disappearance of winter rains and snow has been one of the reasons of the decreasing vegetation cover, but the desert is still home to several hundred different grass species. Still, a thin snowpack still lingers for a few days in most winters in the U.S. portions of the Chihuahuan, even areas as far south as Chihuahua City in Mexico are no strangers to winter driving conditions. Yearly precipitation amounts vary greatly from one year to the next, any month can pass by completely dry - and any month of the year can be the wettest of that year. You can expect 5–10 inches per year on average, some years fail to bring rain in particularly dry spots, whereas others deliver a whopping 15 and even 20 inches causing widespread flooding.I have travelled the whole U.S. desert very extensively, the last, truly monumental trip lasted some 30 weeks altogether and covered a good chunk of it from Southeastern Oregon down to the tip of Baja and over to the Big Bend of the Rio Grande. A follow-up journey of 6 weeks gave me additional insights into the mainland Mexican portions of the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts.To round it off, I lived from 1990–2011 in Ciudad Juarez, located in the Chihuahuan Desert, right across from El Paso.But now I grab the occasion to show off a few of my beloved desert pictures! The approximate position where I have taken the pictures is marked in the following map. Most pictures were taken with my analog Minolta system camera, some of the images from the Chihuahuan Desert are newer. The pictures were mostly taken from fairly remote spots featuring true desert landscapes during regular weather conditions. So no pictures of irrigated fields or cities were selected. So come along for a 20′000 mile long trek across the American Deserts, into a Land of Silence, a land that may lack water and greenery - but is home to some of the most colorful scenery in the world. Let’s boldly go where not many people have gone before and discover a whole new world - and maybe yourself, too. All my major milestones of my life have taken place in the Deserts of North America, from first kiss, first heartbreak, lasting love and raising a family - reason enough for me to call it home..Great Basin Desert - Land of many Greys..Eureka Dunes, Death Valley National Park. These beautiful, pearly-white dunes are astonishingly tall, some 700 feet! Death Valley itself is situated at very low altitudes and belongs to the Mojave Desert, some of it is well below sea level. But the Eureka Basin is already at some 3000 ft above sea level, across from the “Last Chance Range” - and it is considered to be part of the Great Basin. You can get to this somewhat unusual starting point from San Francisco via Yosemite and Tioga Pass - and experience a startling transition from urban bustle, fertile farmland, lush forests, majestic mountian scenery into an utter void of vastness, limitless views - and neverending silence..Traveling through the Great Basin Desert can be a bit intimidating, maybe daunting - but also surprising! While there is definitively some urban-ness to places like Carson City and Reno, once you pass by the last vestiges of civilisation you are on your own. It is quite similar to setting out onto a vast ocean, but this Sea is sagebrush grey, not navy blue. But then, once you arrive at the shore of Pyramid Lake, you stare in disbelief at this piece of molten turquoise. That is what the Great Basin would have looked like at the end of the Ice Age, every large enclosed basin would have contained one of these usually shallow lakes. Pyramid Lake is resisting becoming yet another mudflat because it is being fed by the Truckee River, the outflow of Lake Tahoe. Since the Sierra Nevada is made up from granite, the water of the river does not contain many minerals - hence Pyramid Lake is only very slightly salty despite lacking an outlet to the sea..Getting away from everything in Berlin, Central Nevada! Ghost Towns and abandoned buildings are quite common in the Great Basin Desert. Not many German Berliners may now the namesake town in the desert of Nevada, but if they did they certainly would ask themselves just as I did? Why in the world did they call this forgotten place Berlin?!? As is often the case here, the reason to start the town was mining, you can still visit the “Assayer’s Lab” and it looks as if he and the miners must have been abducted and could be back at any moment. Even the old lab equipment is still there - but the silver and gold ores has long since then petered out.If you happen to amble by, don’t miss the ichthyosaur exhibit nearby, the official state fossil of Nevada, a fish-like dinosaur - as during those times. the entire western U.S. was covered by an ocean..Those ghosts here seem to have resisted the eviction orders! Imagine my shock, when I was rambling among the “abandoned” buildings and taking pictures and suddenly one of the fellows stood before me! The picture is 33 years old, so they might indeed be haunting the vast expanses of Northwestern Nevada, in the Black Rock Desert by now.They must have thought that I was inoffensive - as I was visibly alone, a bit of a loner like them. They were sifting through the old scrap heap of mining debris the other oldtimers left behind 100 years ago while THEY were looking for gold and silver, of course. The Great Basin Desert is still famous for its exceptional richness in all sorts of minerals. Exceptionally rich bonanza-style deposits of silver and gold gave reason for towns to appear out of nothing like mushrooms - and to disappear when the deposits were mined out.These two guys here may actually have been pioneers - as mining for so-called colloidal gold is actually a big industry now in the Great Basin, gold dispersed so finely that it cannot be seen by the unaided eye..Black Rock Desert - The Northwestern Great Basin is dominated by several large examples of dry lake beds that stayed behind when “Lake Lahontan” dried up after the last Ice Age. These completely sterile surfaces of enormous dimensions are here named as individual deserts. Black Rock Desert is the best-known and by far the largest of them. The name stems from a volcanic outcropping at the edge of the feature that in other deserts of the U.S. is called “playa” (Spanish for beach). These dry lake beds only form in areas that have no outlet to the sea, either because they are located below sea level - or as is the case here, because the basins are surrounded by higher terrain and there is not enough surface water available to fill the basins so they overflow towards the sea.I have always been intrigued by these enormous surfaces and would guide my vehicle onto it whenever some sort of track led down to it. Then — FLOOR IT!! - and like a comet with an enormous veil of dust behind you fly across the endless surface, flat as a mirror..Steen’s Mountain, extreme Southeastern Oregon. This is Oregon, too! Not a shot from an airplane but from atop Steen’s Mountain. This range sharply rises some 5000 ft out of the Alvord Basin. Despite its height of almost 10′000 ft, Steen’s Mountain has no vegetation on its eastern flank. It’s either too dry at the foot of the mountain, too steep and rocky in the middle and too cold and windy on the top. If you spend the night all by yourself up here you will be about as far away from everything as you will get while still travelling by car.And if you have a camper you will have the room with the very best view for free. But driving up here is not your average Sunday outing. Accumulating snow can appear up here in most months of the year..It’s alive! The “Black Desert of Idaho” is maybe the most desolate section of the Great Basin Desert - and it’s one of the few areas of that desert that actually do have an outlet to the sea via the Snake River and onward with the Columbia. Here, the world is reduced to black and blue with a few puffs of white - and this little green pine tree. It took me 2 days to navigate my camper-truck with 4 WD across this bleakest of all lands, only a handful of dirt roads venture into this forbidding realm with not a single town or home being evident. Some of these flint-hard plains actually have tube-like openings, long tunnels or caves in them where ice is being conserved for thousands of years..Craters of the Moon National Monument, Idaho is quite aptly named, as there are several large blasting craters and volcanic cones to visit, long since inactive as is the remainder of the lava field. But the main attraction for me were the “black sand dunes” - or dull grey, rather. The American Desert is not one of the sandiest deserts on earth, not by a long shot, simply because the rocks that are found here do not readily disintegrate into sand grains. But it might be the desert with the most diversely-colored sands on earth! Dark grey comes across as particularly odd. Other sand dunes in the American Desert are golden, coral pink, buff, pearly white - and alabaster white! I had brought a sample of each back to Switzerland - but they have become lost since then..Painted Desert - Playground of Rocks.Once you turn southeastward from the Idaho desert you leave the Great Basin Desert into Wyoming, where you might marvel at a new scenery. It is still dry, but little by little you notice that your world is becoming more colorful, maybe at Flaming Gorge in Wyoming, or Dinosaur National Monument in Colorado/Utah, where the Yampa River meets the Colorado. Canyons start to appear as a new landform - and Canyonlands National Park could be your first stop to have a closer look at the Painted Desert. This large park is often overlooked altogether or not really appreciated, as this will require several days. An almost spiritual dimension is added when you spend a whole day in the so-called Needles Section - or maybe you want to venture into the fabled Maze. In this case bring a week and appropriate gear.Here I just spent the day watching the unfolding scenery, also spending the night. Only a few vestiges of vegetation has survived the rigors of the desert, plants here depend on the presence of a delicate surface cover made up from mud, algae and other microscopic life forms, called cryptogamic soil. One should not walk cross-country in such areas as this “soil” takes centuries to recover..Escalante Desert - Burr Trail. Arguably the driest section of the Painted Desert it is dominated by large expanses of dried, colorful mud that is entirely devoid of plants and these mesa-like formations taking on the weirdest shapes and forms. Summer travellers are rewarded by the most unusual cloud-formations, but watch out for the trail becoming undriveable by the slightest of rain - and the Escalante River may go into flood with no cloud in the sky where you expect to ford it. The river originates in the high nondesert areas of Central Utah where in summer you get almost daily thunderstorms..Capitol Reef National Park is bordering the Painted Desert in the west, where the colorful mountains that contain Cedar Breaks National Monument and Bryce Canyon National Park serve as a dividing structure to the Great Basin Desert.Unusual the way the terrain is visibly tilted, and how differently-colored strata give origin to different ways of how they erode. The massive red sandstones form vertical cliffs and slot-canyons, whereas the white rock erodes into dome-like features that were likened to the “Capitol” style buildings used to house federal and state parliaments in the U.S.Here the desert is already taking on the aspect of an open woodland with scrub-pine and juniper, plants that have a higher water requirement.The Confluence - Cataract Canyon. Water, water everywhere! Imprisoned by their self-created containment walls, the Green River out of Wyoming and the Colorado meet at this hard-to-reach spot. The Green River is not green here anymore but just as muddy as the Colorado, coming out of the canyon with the cool-whip covered columns, whereas the slightly larger and brick-red Colorado flows in from the right - just like us on our rowed inflatable boat that has brought us here in three days. Tours through Cataract Canyon start at Moab and last usually 5 days - the last day is spent on spectacular Cataract Canyon..Upper Glen Canyon near Lake Powell after Cataract Canyon. The last night in the Canyon - a great way to say goodbye to a place I was not to see again in life is to climb up the canyon wall as far as I could. Little by little, the land starts to look like the Grand Canyon - where the colorful sandstone rocks slowly start to rise higher and higher up on the side walls and the river starts to cut through increasingly older rocks. Glen Canyon proper is currently submerged by Lake Powell, however increasing drought causes the water level in the reservoir to slowly drop. Parts of the canyon that was being taken up by the lake back in 1987 is now free-flowing rivercourse again.The Gooseneck of the Colorado within a Sea of Red! This is a picture from the single engine plane that brought us back to Moab where the river trek had started. We had hiked across the narrow neck while the guide took the boat around the loop - in a sudden thunderstorm with pink water cascading over the cliffs all around us - just another surprising aspect of this fascinating desert where time and water are playing with rocks, creating a fairytale wonderland. The Colorado has only created one gooseneck here, the better-known and easier to reach loops with the same name have been cut into the plateau by the San Juan River out of New Mexico..“The Mexican Hat” - Navajo Nation; Arizona/Utah. A Stone Sombrero is standing guard on a tall rock formation, defying the laws of gravity as so many other rock formations do here. At least for now..Monument Valley Tribal Park - Navajo Nation Arizona/Utah. Glowing blotches of red-hot rock seem to float in an endless sea of dryness.The structures are actually gigantic mesas, some 1500 ft tall, called witness mountains in German (Zeugenberge) - as they give evidence to the existence of a continuous layer of rock that covered the plain 1500 ft thick in ancient times. Mother Nature, working as a patient sculptor then chiseled away with her watery tools anything that did not look like the three world-famous “monuments”..Slowly, the color starts to fade and bleach out once you move into New Mexico and Northeast Arizona. There are still crimson-red mesas and the occasional pillar and knob, but after a month, this was starting to be my new world not worthy of more expensive analog pictures. But this landscape here near Farmington certainly caught my attention - as it did for the local Indian tribe of the Navajo. It holds great spiritual significance for them, specially “The Ship Rock” which you can barely see at the right side of the picture. It resembles in a striking fashion the sinking Titanic as it went down vertically to the bottom at the end of her struggle. The Rock is just as big as the buttes in Monument Valley above - a testimony to the openness of this land, and how clear and crisp the air is..Petrified Forest National Park near Holbrook, Arizona. Yes, that huge log is indeed made up from solid rock! The barren, windswept plain of Northeast Arizona is usually that part of the land that is known as Painted Desert, it is made up by the same layers of colorful muds I had seen further north in Utah near the Escalante River. Because of that - and because the whole area is so colorful overall - I prefer to call this section of the American Desert Painted Desert..Mojave Desert - Dark Desert Highways.It is somewhat unclear, where exactly the vegetation makeup and rainfall patterns of the Painted Desert changes over into typical Mojave Desert scenery. Most of the Inner Gorge of the Grand Canyon does show similarity, certainly the surroundings of Lake Mead belong to the Mojave Desert. But here in Valley of Fire State Park it looks like as if the ever-playful red rocks of the Painted Desert have decided to send a few splotches of bright reds as a fare well almost into Las Vegas. Valley of Fire is aptly named, not just for the fiery reds of its outcroppings but for the infernal heat the area displays during summer. The main difference between the Great Basin Desert and the Painted Desert and the Mojave is the fact that the latter does get near or above 120 F in many places..This is certainly the case here! Zabriskie’s Point - Death Valley National Park. The desert seems to be making an honest effort to prove that you don’t need life to show ofh bright colors. The lowest parts of Death Valley are famously vegetation-free or nearly so, a consequence of unbearable summer heat that has breached the ominous 130 F air temperature limit, the only place on earth to do so under controlled and WMO-approved measuring conditions. Contrary to a commonly-held belief - it is usually not cold at night during summer in most deserts. Certainly not in Death Valley, where your overnight low very well can be 104 F. They are suffering through an unusual September heatwave as I type this, Sept 6th or 7th 2020 might crack 125 F..You should earn your PhD Desert Rat Diploma before attempting this venture! Devil’s Playground is a far more formidable desert hideout than Death Valley. No park ranger will keep an eye out for you here - and no backcountry permits are issued. If you go here you will be on your own - despite California being the most populous U.S. state. Only YOU can make sure that you return safe and sound. This is a far more open setting, you can see for dozens if not hundreds of miles, there is more sand, more silence and loneliness and this sense of toughness and underlying danger the Mojave Desert is capable to transmit. While drifting across the forgotten two-lane highways you sometimes might come across a banged-up truck similar to the one featured in “Duel” - and does it just look like as if these hills behind this night’s campground indeed do have eyes?!?.It is here in the Western-Mojave Desert where you will come across the odd motel that people indeed book for a quick stint of fiery sex while you try to catch an eyeful of sleep under air conditioning after the first drenching shower in days. These lone, straight as an arrow highways, the shimmering light far in the distance, the warm smell of creosote bushes filling the air. The sense of being lost not only in the desert but at life as a whole.The lack of purpose. The loneliness - as if one senses that the bustling, the partying the rich and beautiful - all this is just a mere two hours away. But you are never feeling more alone than when being lonely in midst of a crowd. The Mojave Desert, it might well be heaven as it might be hell - but in any case, I would never leave.But nobody cares, never will, just the way nobody cares about this city of dead-looking shrubs desiccating in the November sun, all the world seems to have turned into dead bushes and glaring light. Nobody would even notice if one of them would blow away in the upcoming storm - just as no one notices the passing of one person in a large city. We are only a tiny speck of lint in the storm..And then, a faint rumble! One of the busiest railroad of the entire U.S. crosses the Mojave Desert near Amboy Crater, providing impressive sights for any train spotter. This behemoth is on its way to Cajon Pass and onward to Los Angeles. Five engines up front, two in the middle and one at the end. Besides the railroad, the equally busy and important Interstate 10 passes through the Mojave as well, whereas I-40 heads over to Las Vegas, following roughly the fabled Route 66. The big empty slice of land between the interstates is seldom visited, just giving the impression that the Mojave Desert is the best-known desert the world over - it has been serving as a backdrop in countless movies..The iconic Joshua Tree of the Mojave looks underwhelming during the day - but almost psychedelic at sunset. But you have to be willing to spend the night in such spooky surroundings. The best place to see them is of course in Joshua Tree National Park. This park is yet another true gem of the system - if you actually take the time and take a few hours to hike and sleep here. The park then straddles the interesting Sonora-Mojave transition zone which is mainly noticeable by the increasing number of cactus species..Transition Zone near Needles, California.The bright-red clump of cacti is sclerocactus, not the well-known barrel cactus you find as solitary plant further south. The yuccas are typical for the High Desert, they are probably soaptree yucca. The area along the Colorado River below Hoover Dam and adjacent Imperial Valley is the hottest populated region of the United States where people in Needles, Bullhead City, Laughlin, Blythe and El Centro occasionally have to endure afternoon highs in the lower to mid 120s..Sonoran Desert - The BeautifulWhen coming out of the Mojave, you will have to earn your entrance into the Paradise of the Sonoran Desert you might have seen in documentaries and magazines, as the land actually becomes more hostile to life the further south you get.Some beauties are a bit rough around the edges - at least those I consider beautiful - and the Sonoran Desert is no exception. It is probably the most diverse of all American deserts, containing no less than seven subdivisions. But only two of them occur in the U.S. But even here you notice quite a change in landscapes, plant cover and overall aspect when you travel from west to east from the driest areas to the wettest. The westernmost parts lie actually some 200 ft below sea level. Here at the edge of Imperial Valley you find the largest sandy desert of the United States, however these dunes are all but a mere extension of the enormous sea of sand that is “El Gran Desierto de Altar” in Sonora, Mexico, the heart of the Sonoran Desert. Some beauties have a cruel heart indeed!.Being in the right spot at the right time of day with the camera ready to go! Analog picture taking has its own setbacks, film being heat-sensitive is just one of them.Bighorn sheep (Borrego cimarrón in Spanish) are elusive and hard to spot, but this one might have felt like watching the upcoming sunset here in Anza Borrego Desert State Park located in the southeast corner of California. This state park is as big as Big Bend National Park in Texas - and similar to that marvel of the Chihuahuan Desert, Anza Borrego has several quite distinct sections. Areas near the Transpeninsular Range sometimes burst into spectacular bloom in February, usually after a cooperative El Niño- Event. Most rainfall, sometimes 90% and more - arrives in winter here, the westernmost Sonoran Desert does not get meaningful summer rains unless a hurricane gets lost in the Gulf of California..The scrap heap of “Charlie’s Chocolate Factory” - since we Swiss know better than that and ours always turns out great! But chocolate it is indeed - the name of the range here. Chocolate Mountains! This area north of Imperial Valley is easily one of the most desolate and oddly colored places in the American Desert, too dry and too hot for even cacti to grow in. At the range’s foothills bordering the Salton Trough you can see the San Andreas Fault line in action, it is clearly visible to even a layman - however I never had a look at it.You can spend as much time as you want here in the American Desert - you will never see it all!.November clouds in the “Zone of Death” - Anza Borrego Desert State Park, California, near the border. The only thing alive seem to be the clouds. 95 F - at the start of November. One often reads that the utter dryness of Death Valley is owed to the rain-shadow effect of the lofty Sierra Nevada to the west. But this desert here is actually rather close to the sea - and there are no meaningful mountains in between. If you were to cross into Mexico here you would not notice if it wasn’t for “The Wall” - as the landscape is just as desolate in adjacent Mexico - and stays like that all the way to the coast.So, where is it then, the “beautiful” Sonoran Desert, the one featured in “Living Desert” or on those calendars?You have to earn your entrance to Paradise…. So let’s cut the journey short and we cut over eastward and leave Baja for another time! Let’s look for those Saguaros!.And slowly but surely, once you head on Interstate 8 into Arizona, you will discover the first ones! A few of them have made a surprise appearance, as monarchs of the desert checking out their lonely kingdom. Here in “King of Arizona National Wildlife Refuge”, in Southwestern Arizona, you can find sublime lighting, soothing solitude, and an emptiness that requires some adaptation. Late afternoon is the only time of day when you can actually enjoy a little hike here in late July. Stay for the night without a tent - it is never getting really cold - and while any month of the year can yield a good rain - it might well be the only one.This section of desert is probably among the most pristine areas of the U.S. portion of the Sonoran Desert, Luke Air Force Bombing Range to the south of here is probably still less disturbed, for obvious reasons. The very scant desert vegetation takes on an unique appearance, as if someone had created a secret garden, where you have a large number of species - but very few individuals. In Southwestern Arizona, the average rainfall amounts from 3–4 inches, but the extremely well-adapted plant community can survive and even thrive under these conditions while resisting temperatures in the low 120s in summer..Saguaro is usually grabbing all the attention here, but the Sonoran Desert is home to a great many number of other species from the very large and extended cactus family, creating a whole botanical garden near Gila Bend. Arizona. On this seemingly barren hill, there are no fewer than 5 cactus species evident, the yellow puffs in the middle are flowering Palo Verdes - a sign that we are approaching the Eastern Sonoran Desert - and that it is spring in the Desert, more specifically May..Don’t step on me you clumsy oaf of a desert rat! Say hi to species Nr. six!.The Big Boys grow in the rainier part of the Sonoran Desert - like here along Ajo Mountains Drive in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. Watch how dense the underbrush has become - and how massive these cacti really are. The tallest ones grow to near 60 ft, a more common height is 40–50 ft for a mature specimen. It takes anywhere from 150–200 years for a Saguaro to get this big..The Arizona State Flower - the Saguaro bloom! A typical bat-flower, but it also gets visits by birds and night-flying insects, as the flowers open in the evening and last into late morning the following day.Only mature Saguaros some 10 ft tall usually flower, they start at age 70 while they are still “unarmed”, only showing a single trunk. At the site of the first flowers, the cactus will then form its first arm - some 40 years later. So to say, a saguaro enters puberty at age 70 - and stops being a teenager 40 years later.So how does one get a picture like this without carrying a ladder into the desert?Look for a specimen that grows its arms downward and show up during flowering season! Every arm will also produce flowers on its top. Such plants are not common - but they exist. And since you have endless amounts of time here - spend a few hours of it looking for one..A cactus forest! Saguaro forests such as this one here in the Eastern Part of Saguaro National Park near Tucson are found on the western slopes of the Sierra Madre Occidental where rainfall is more plentiful - and more reliable. The Sierra Madre Occidental indeed crosses a bit into the U.S., you can even see an example of these impressive “Barrancas” of the Sierra near Phoenix - Salt River Canyon. Here in Southeast Arizona you actually get to double dip if you are a cactus, winter rains are not as impressive - but they yield more life-giving water than the rowdy und messy “monsoons” of summer that are “mas ruido que nueces” as they say in Mexico (More noise than nuts)These cactus forests can be seen from Southestern Arizona all the way down into the deep south of Sonora, some of them grow there right alongside pine trees up in the inaccessible canyons and barrancas of the Rio Yaqui - but it would be unwise to go there these days..Chihuahuan Desert - The UnknownLarge dry lake beds known locally as “Barreal” or “Playa” cover the northwestern part of the Chihuahuan Desert. The alcaline dust from these huge, sterile surfaces travels for hundreds of miles all the way to El Paso, Texas. The conspicious plant is neither an agave nor a yucca and it’s not a cactus either, but a Nolina or locally - Sotol. They are able to flower every year conditions permitting - and can be used to make a distilled spirit, called Sotol, the official liquor of Chihuahua, Mexico.This rather small playa is found in the so-called Bootheel of New Mexico, a seldom visited region of the already remote southern third of that state. Some of the biggest playas of the Chihuahuan are then found in adjacent Chihuahua. One of them, an 80 mile long and 12 mile wide nothingness with a solid surface was evidently being used to land a Boeing 737 on. The plane was carrying cocaine right out of Colombia to almost the U.S. border, by the most notorious drug lord of Ciudad Juarez, Amado Carillo, “El Señor de los Cielos” - The Lord of the Skies. Eliminating the Juarez Cartel, locally known as “La Linea” was a main objective of the Mexican drug war, which cost anywhere between 10′000 and 20′000 lives in Juarez alone between 2007 and 2012.Impressive rocks, a bright blue sky that seems to glow from within - and mountains rising to almost 9000 ft while remaining barren from bottom to the top - this is the northwestern Chihuahua Desert at its finest - after a reasonably moist winter. Observe the faint violet or lilac glow that seems to come from within the rock - this glow is hard to catch on film - but it’s always been a delight to my eyes.The so-called Tri-State-Area near El Paso, Texas; the picture is from November 1st 2018. The range to the left are the Franklins (some 7200 ft high) the right, smaller range is Sierra Juarez, in northernmost Chihuahua and the flat, featureless plain in the front is located in Southern New Mexico. El Paso - The Pass - is the break in between the mountains where I-10, the railroad and the Rio Grande pass through.Nobody would guess, that some 2.5 million people call this desolate location home, as virtually all people here live in Ciudad Juarez, El Paso and Las Cruces, leaving most surrounding areas untouched. Both ranges are about 30 miles straight off to the east from this remote spot..Hueco Tanks State Historical Park is found 30 miles east of El Paso and has great significance to local Indian tribes, as they and their forefathers have left hundreds of rock paintings, some of them known to be more than 10′000 years old. The hills look as if they consist of loose, huge boulders someone piled atop of each other, they are a hotspot for bouldering and rock climbing as well as for taking pictures. Runoff from infrequent rains collect in ponds and holes (the “huecos”) and provide year-round drinking water for man and beast that happen to amble by. Late October 2018.Not from this world - that is what I often exclaimed when travelling in the Chihuahuan Desert. A very unusual April cloud deck provides an eerie atmosphere to this rock formation - which in reality is a 7100 ft mountain made up from marble at 10 miles distance rising apruptly 3500 ft from this desolate plain covered in nothing but small, reddish rocks and residual grasses. The mountain is locally known as “La Candelaria”.This scene is readily seen from your car window - if you dare to travel 50 miles south of the border out of El Paso through Juarez into Chihuahua. The picture is from April 2015.Back in 1990, this same area was still being used for cattle grazing, giving testimonial to an ongoing drying trend. While the absolute amount of rain has not decreased by much - the way it is occuring did. Until 2000, some 30–40 percent of all precipitation arrived between October and March, a significant part of it as accumulating snow. This favored the growth of a thin, perennial grass cover. Nowadays, almost all rain falls between the end of June until September and what this makes to grow are just weeds. The average number of days with 100+ F heat has nearly doubled, so more water will evaporate right as it falls.Welcome to America’s newest National Park - White Sands National Park, New Mexico! The white sands are not really made of true sand, but from tiny gypsum crystals. Covering some 300 sq miles, this is the world’s largest gypsum desert. There are plenty of pictures around from these dunes - but none will feature the rare variety of Echinocereus triglochidiatus, growing to a height of almost 2 feet and featuring the most spectacular crimson red flowers of all 1500 or so cactus species worldwide.Southeastern New Mexico near Roswell in the Pecos River Valley features mostly flat terrain that contains some of the hottest parts of the Chihuahuan Desert. Notice how the far-off mountain range is producing a line of clouds. These will often grow into enormous thunderheads in the afternoon, providing ample rains to the mountain ranges, but almost nothing for the desert surrounding them..Canyons of desolation, canyons that are inaccessible. No one is organizing mule treks here as in Grand Canyon, no jeep tours like in Canyonlands! This is a wild land, an untamed land - the Land of Breaking Bad, Narcos and No Country for Old Men. The Borderland. Barren, unforgiving and blistering hot - but full of history about raiding Comanches, a lone Spaniard on foot crossing as first European into Chihuahua and the rally calls of the Mexican Revolution that started right here back on November 20th, 1910. And maybe the odd anecdote about a young Swiss who dared to mess around with local women. Near Cuchillo Parado, Chihuahua, close to Presidio, Texas on the Conchos River.The triple alliance between boiling clouds, bright sky and deeply eroded, empty expanses reveals the fact that it is summer in Big Bend National Park, Texas. A place that is hard to reach, but should not be missed if one wants to claim to have seen the U.S Southwest. Not many people take the 6 hour trek across lonely highways from the next city that is needed to get here..A flowering Sotol plant is guarding the access to Santa Elena Canyon on the Rio Grande. The odd-looking gash in the wall is not a break-in into Mr Trump’s border wall but the mouth of the 1700 ft deep slot-like canyon. The left edge is in Mexico, the right in the U.S. I was trying to walk to the canyon mouth and badly misjudged the distance - it’s still a day’s worth of walking away - as there is no trail and many deep gullies.Echinocactus horizontalonius features one of the most spectacular flower of all Chihuahuan cacti. It is common throughout the northern half of the desert, but you hardly notice the plant if it is not flowering. You can step right on this one - it has a similar consistency as the rocks - and the spines point sideways! But beware of the “Horse Crippler” - a close relative, also known as Devil’s Head.Not from this world!The Chisos Mountains putting up a great show onto the stage that also features the slow death of a thunderstorm that failed to provide rain - as is so often the case here.The Chihuahuan Desert is an unexpected place where the dream of a white Christmas comes true. But it is not an uncommon occurrence. In my 21 years living in Ciudad Juarez, we had 7 years with snow on the ground either on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. This scene is from around 1997, December 26th. Visiting my wife’s grandmother on her lonely desert farm. The two girls are 2 of her great-grandchildren - and my older two daughters. “Nuevo Zaragoza” - municipality of Villa Ahumada 120 miles south-southwest of El Paso, Texas.We visited her almost monthly for many years, bringing groceries to the old lady and her aging bachelor son. During these outings, my children have learned to love the desert - and I have learned that it is possible to live a long and meaningful life with hardly any worldly possesions or commodities. She died 2004, being 96 years old - from a fall in the shower at the home of one of her many grandchildren.