Mojave Desert
A high North American desert of Joshua trees and the searing floor of Death Valley
The Mojave is the smallest and driest of the North American deserts, a high, rugged country of roughly 140,000 square kilometres lying largely in southeastern California and spilling into Nevada, Arizona, and Utah. It is best known for two extremes: the strange, spiky Joshua tree, a giant yucca that grows almost nowhere else, and Death Valley, where the lowest, hottest, and driest conditions in North America converge in a basin sunk 86 metres below sea level.
A transitional desert between the cold Great Basin to the north and the hot Sonoran to the south, the Mojave sits mostly above 600 metres, its basins and rugged ranges studded with creosote scrub and the occasional eerie Joshua tree forest. Rainfall is meagre and concentrated in winter. Within it, Death Valley recorded 56.7 degrees Celsius in 1913, long cited as the highest air temperature ever measured on Earth. Salt flats, sand dunes, dry lakebeds, and slot canyons fill the desert, alongside surprising oases fed by springs.
Indigenous peoples including the Mojave, Chemehuevi, and Southern Paiute long inhabited the desert's rivers and springs. Nineteenth-century prospectors crossed it chasing gold and silver, and borax mined from Death Valley was famously hauled out by twenty-mule teams. In the twentieth century the desert's emptiness and clear skies drew military testing, the gambling oasis of Las Vegas on its northern edge, and the iconic stretch of Route 66, while Joshua Tree National Park now protects its signature trees.