The Mojave Desert
The driest desert in North America
The Mojave Desert covers much of southeastern California and parts of Nevada, Arizona, and Utah — the smallest but driest of the North American deserts, lying in the deep rain shadow of the Sierra Nevada. It is a high desert of broad basins and bare mountain ranges, home to Death Valley, the lowest and hottest place on the continent, and to the twisted Joshua trees that grow nowhere else and mark the desert's rough boundaries.
The Mojave sits as a transition between the cooler, higher Great Basin Desert to the north and the hotter Sonoran Desert to the south. Some spots here receive less than two inches of rain a year. Despite its harshness it is far from empty — it holds Las Vegas, the Mojave National Preserve, and Joshua Tree National Park, and its stark basins and ranges are a classic example of the basin-and-range country of the West.