Mojave Desert

• 1. Beside the Water

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  The Mojave Desert holds Death Valley, the lowest elevation in North America. Yet the desert carries the name of a people whose own word for themselves, Hamakhaave, means "beside the water." The spelling Mojave comes from Spanish, while Mohave comes from modern English. Both are in use, though the Mojave Tribal Nation officially chooses Mojave. The desert covers roughly 54,000 square miles, mostly in southeastern California and southwestern Nevada, with small stretches reaching into Arizona and Utah. Together with the Sonoran, Chihuahuan and Great Basin deserts, it forms part of a larger North American desert. Among them it is the smallest and the driest. So how does a place named for water end up this dry? Where does its rain go, and why do so many unusual plants grow here and almost nowhere else? And how do millions of people now fit into a landscape this unforgiving?

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• 2. Borders and Basins

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  Two great cracks in the earth mark the edges of the Mojave. The San Andreas Fault runs along the southwest, and the mountains lifted beside it form a clear wall against the coastal regions. To the north, the Garlock Fault divides the desert from the Sierra Nevada and the Tehachapi mountains. The eastern boundary is far harder to draw. Along the west the Sierra Nevada stands guard, while the Sonoran Desert lies to the south and east. In the east, the Joshua tree, a plant found nowhere else, fades out, and with it goes the easiest marker. Inside these limits the land follows a repeating pattern of parallel mountain ranges separated by valleys. Most of the desert sits between 2000 and 4,000 feet, which earns it the nickname high desert. Sloping aprons of rubble called bajadas spread from the mountain bases toward the low basins. At the bottom of those basins, water gathers and evaporates, leaving behind salt and flat dry lakebeds known as playas. Rogers Dry Lake and China Lake are two of them. Farther east, about 40 miles of dunes and salt flats called the Devils Playground run northwest to southeast, between the town of Baker, California and the Providence Mountains. The Cronese Mountains rise from the middle of it.

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• 3. Rivers Underground

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  Surface rivers are almost absent in the Mojave, and the two major ones spend much of their lives hidden beneath the ground. The Mojave River begins in the San Bernardino mountains, flows only intermittently, and then sinks out of sight. The Amargosa River also travels partly underground, taking a southward path across the desert. Lakes do exist. The Manix, Mojave and Little Mojave lakes are large but shallow, and Soda Lake is the main salty basin. True springs are rare. Two stand out. Ash Meadows is built from several smaller springs that all draw water from deep below. Oasis Valley, by contrast, takes its water from the nearby Amargosa River.

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• 4. Heat, Storms and Fire

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  Summer afternoons in the Mojave regularly climb above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Winter brings the opposite: freezing nights and strong winds, with snow in the mountains. The desert sits in the rain shadow of the southern Sierra Nevada and the Transverse Ranges, so moisture arrives sparingly. Most of it comes from Pacific storms that move eastward between November and April. These storms mostly drop rain and snow on the mountains, which leaves the leeward slopes drier still. High places such as the San Gabriel mountains can receive more rain than the rest. In late summer, strong thunderstorms can unleash cloudbursts and flash floods. Fire was once rare here, because sparse plants left little fuel and gaps between them kept flames from spreading. That changed within the last few decades. Invasive annual plants from the genera Bromus, Schismus and Brassica now blanket the ground and carry fire across it, altering many areas. At higher elevations, fires come regularly but infrequently.

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• 5. Deep Time

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  Some rocks beneath Death Valley National Park are at least 1700 million years old, cooked and squeezed by heat and pressure until they changed form. A mass of granite pushed into them about 1400 million years ago. Afterward the area was lifted and then worn down for nearly 500 million years. The Death Valley region alone shows at least 23 sedimentary formations and two large gaps in the geologic record. The desert's rock first formed under shallow water in the Precambrian. Thick layers of conglomerate, mudstone and carbonate built up there, capped by stromatolites and possibly by deposits from a hypothesized Snowball Earth glaciation. The supercontinent Rodinia then thinned and split, letting seawater flood in. Sediment piled up at the foot of a submerged cliff and buried the region's first known fossils of complex life. In the Mesozoic, the Farallon Plate began diving beneath the North American Plate. Volcanoes and rising mountains followed, and erosion later smoothed them toward a plain. The present landscape began about 16 million years ago, when the crust under western North America started stretching. By 2 to 3 million years ago that stretching had torn apart the Death Valley area, creating Death Valley and Panamint Valley. During each glacial period, from 240,000 years ago to 10,000 years ago, Lake Manly filled Death Valley. About 10,500 years ago the lakes lost their glacial meltwater from the Sierra Nevada and began to concentrate salts and minerals. The modern desert emerged after they dried. Its rocks also hold gold, tungsten and silver, heavily mined before the Second World War. Copper, tin, lead-zinc, manganese, iron and several radioactive substances are known but have never been commercially mined.

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• 6. Life in Isolation

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  Creosote bush covers much of the Mojave, joined by all-scale, brittlebush, desert holly and white burrobush. Cacti add variety, including silver cholla, Mojave prickly pear, beavertail cactus and the many-headed barrel cactus. The desert holds more endemic plants than almost anywhere in the world. Mountains in the Sierra Nevada and the high Colorado Plateau walled these plants off, and they evolved in isolation. Different landforms host different plant communities, and winter annuals are abundant. Animals tell a quieter story. Bighorn sheep, mountain lions, black-tailed jackrabbits and desert tortoises are the notable residents. LeConte's thrasher, the banded gecko, the chuckwalla and the Mojave rattlesnake round out a long list of reptiles and birds, many shared with neighboring deserts. Endemic animals are fewer than endemic plants, but they exist. Examples include the Mohave ground squirrel, the Amargosa vole and two insects named for the Kelso Dunes. The Mojave fringe-toed lizard is almost entirely confined to the desert. The rarest resident may be the Devils Hole pupfish, a fish found nowhere else that lives in one hot spring near Death Valley.

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• 7. People and Pressure

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  In 1776, a Franciscan friar named Francisco Garcés became the first explorer of the Mojave Desert, and he recorded details about the people already living there. Those inhabitants, including the Mohave, were hunter-gatherers. American explorers followed as interests moved into California. In 1826, Jedediah Smith crossed the desert and reached the San Gabriel Mission. Today the Mojave is sparsely populated overall, but cities are growing. Las Vegas is the largest, with about 2.3 million people. St. George, Utah, with around 180,000 people in 2020, sits where the Mojave meets the Great Basin and the Colorado Plateau. Lancaster-Palmdale has more than 400,000 residents, and the Victorville area has around 550,000. Towns such as Pahrump, Kingman and Twentynine Palms have grown quickly since 1990. Edwards Air Force Base and Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake host experimental aviation and weapons projects. Ghost towns survive too. Calico was a silver and copper mining town, and Kelso was a railroad depot. Others were stranded when Interstates replaced U.S. Route 66 and U.S. Route 91. Growth carries a cost. Development around Las Vegas and Los Angeles harms wildlife, and landfill demand from both cities could affect plants and animals badly. Farming along the Colorado River degrades habitat, with Ward Valley and Riverside County among the hardest hit. Renewable energy adds its own pressure. Federal land is leased cheaply to wind and solar companies. The Desert Sunlight Solar Farm, one of the largest in the world, stands about five miles from Joshua Tree National Park. In 2014 an endangered Yuma clapper rail was found dead there. Conservation groups responded by working to protect birds from the lake effect, in which glare from solar panels can resemble open water.

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• 8. Protected Ground

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  In 1994, the California Desert Protection Act designated 69 wilderness areas and created Death Valley National Park, Joshua Tree National Park and the Mojave National Preserve. That law helps make the Mojave one of the best protected distinct ecoregions in the United States. The World Wildlife Fund lists it as relatively stable and intact. Still, the southwest and central east are threatened by off-road vehicles, growing recreation, development and grazing. Many other protections exist, including Mojave Trails National Monument, Desert National Wildlife Refuge, Valley of Fire State Park and the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve. In 2013, the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan led the Bureau of Land Management to designate 4.2 million acres of public land as protected wilderness. Visitors arrive in great numbers, drawn first by Las Vegas and then by scenery. Lakes Mead, Mohave and Havasu offer water sports, and open land attracts off-road drivers. Calico Ghost Town in Yermo inspired Walter Knott to build Knott's Berry Farm. The desert also appears on screen. At least eleven music videos were shot here, including Sting's "Desert Rose," Madonna's "Frozen" and Beyonce's "Run the World (Girls)." And photographs for U2's 1987 album The Joshua Tree were taken in the Mojave.

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