The Basin and Range

The Basin and Range is the great corrugated desert province of the interior West, where the Earth's crust has been stretched and pulled apart into a long succession of north-south mountain ranges separated by flat, dry valleys. It covers nearly all of Nevada and reaches into Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, California, and Oregon - a landscape one geologist famously likened to an "army of caterpillars marching toward Mexico."

It contains the Great Basin, where rivers drain inward to salt flats and sinks rather than to any sea, as well as the Mojave and Sonoran deserts to the south and the lowest, hottest ground in North America at Death Valley. Sparsely peopled, water-poor, and stunningly stark, it is a region of sagebrush flats, mineral wealth, and isolated desert ranges stretching to every horizon.