The Chihuahuan Desert
The largest desert in North America
The Chihuahuan Desert is the largest desert in North America, spreading across western Texas, southern New Mexico, southeastern Arizona, and a vast area of north-central Mexico. It is a high desert, mostly above 3,500 feet, which makes it cooler than the Sonoran to its west, with cold winters and a summer monsoon. Its basins and ranges hold scrubby grassland, creosote flats, and the brilliant white gypsum dunes of White Sands.
Much of the desert lies in Mexico, but its American edge includes some of the most striking desert country in the United States — Big Bend on the Rio Grande, the Guadalupe Mountains, and Carlsbad Caverns, whose vast chambers were dissolved out of an ancient reef beneath the desert. Agave, yucca, and lechuguilla, a plant found almost only here, mark the Chihuahuan, the least-known of the great North American deserts.