Alan Young, age 10, of Canfield, Ohio, for his question:
Does the big southwestern desert have a name?
First they called it the Great American Desert. Then someone remembered that South America also has some deserts. So ours was renamed the Great North American Desert. Later they marked it on the map and saw that it sprawls over a very large area. It seemed sensible to give names to this part and that part, depending on where they were. Nowadays, we have names for four big desert areas and several small ones.
Ohio is a lovely green state with miles of rich farmlands and countless hills crowded with trees. People who live in green growing places tend to think that our deserts are desolate wastelands where nothing grows at all. They imagine it is bare rocks and endless sandy dunes. True, we do have a few places like that. But these patches of true desert are very small. Most of the Great North American Desert has its own wild plants and its own wild animals.
We call it a desert because usually it gets only a few inches of rain each year. Sometimes a drought lasts several years and deluges of rain arrive all at once. The cactuses, the scrawny plants and the shy desert animals have to make do from shower to shower. Experts call such places arid regions, deserts or semi deserts. Our Big Desert is a long sprawling, strip all the way along the western mountains.
People who live there have different names for it, though nobody is quite sure where one of the smaller deserts ends and the next one begins. The longest portion is called the Great Basin Desert. It stretches all the way from the Columbia River in Washington State down through the Central Valley of California. Somewhere in Southern California it merges with the famous Mohave Desert which may be spelled Mojave.
Some say that the Mohave covers 15,000 square miles, others allow it 25,000 square miles. Its eastern boundary merges with the larger Sonora Desert. It stretches across the southern part of Arizona and a corner of New Mexico. And a strip of the Sonora stretches south across the border into Mexico.
The Sonora's eastern boundary merges with the Chihuahuan Desert. This one touches the southeast corner of Arizona, stretches across southern New Mexico and on into Texas. It also spreads across the border into Mexico. The Sonora Desert is named for the Mexican State of Sonora. The Mexican state of Chihuahua gave its name to our Chihuahuas Desert and also to the cute little Chihuahua dog.
The Great Basin Desert spreads far to the north. In the Southwest there are three large stretches of desert with names of their own, the Sonora, the Chihuahuas and the Mohave. You may miss the greenery, but this southwestern region is a lovely place, where multicolored rocks sparkle in the sunshine under an enormous blue sky. After a rain, its scrawny plants burst into bloom and gaudy flowers are crowded cheek to cheek. Some parts of the desert are irrigated and the fields can be harvested three times a year.