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.
Related
- Big Bend National ParkDesert, river canyons and mountains on the Texas-Mexico border
- Carlsbad Caverns National ParkVast limestone caverns carved from an ancient reef in New Mexico
- Guadalupe Mountains National ParkWest Texas park around a fossil reef and the state’s highest peak
- Lechuguilla CaveThe sealed, pristine cave beneath Carlsbad Caverns National Park
- White Sands National ParkThe world’s largest gypsum dunefield, in New Mexico’s Tularosa Basin
- The Rio GrandeThe river border between the U.S. and Mexico
- New MexicoThe Land of Enchantment, high desert and southern Rockies
- TexasThe Lone Star State, second-largest in area and population