Here is this week’s Monday Monochrome (featured, above), a black and white image of the Mohave Desert in southern California. This image was also included in the new book, Light and Shadow. The Mojave Desert, occupying more than 25,000 square miles, is an arid desert in southern California and portions of Arizona, Utah, and Nevada. Together with the Great Basin Desert, the Sonoran Desert, and the Chihuahuan Desert, the Mojave forms the North American Desert, a unique and vast, arid desert between the Sierra Nevada Mountains. and the Coast Ranges. While these deserts exhibit localized variety, overall they comprise a highly inhospitable region of great aridity, great extremes of temperature and winds, and a predominance of starkly eroded, sun-beaten landscape. The region was first named the “Great American Desert” as early as the 1820s by the vivid reportage of an expedition led by the American pioneer explorer and engineer Stephen H. Long. While the North American Desert includes both “high” and “low” deserts, the Mojave is a prime example of “high” desert, sitting at 2,000 to 4,000 feet above sea level. Many, including me, find the high desert to be a place of exceptional and transcendent beauty.
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