Saline Lakes and 

 Alkaline Flats 



The Great Basin or Gray Deserts, and 

 the Guttered Scablands 



The first white men to see the edge of this great deadeye were six- 

 teenth-century Spanish scouting parties sent out by expeditions 

 which were working northward through the coastal ranges and 

 the South Montane Province. They looked at the edge of this 

 appalling waste and promptly decided to go around it. Later, 

 they learned from the Amerindians that theirs had been a wise 

 decision, for even these latter had long abandoned most of it as 

 worthless or too dangerous even as regular hunting grounds. 

 When Anglo-Saxon Europeans began to infiltrate the west coast 

 from the sea, and later across the prairies and over the moun- 

 tains from the east, they likewise stood on its rim and wondered. 

 Those coming from the west stopped at the eastern edges of the 

 Cascades and the Sierra Nevada, whereas those from the east 

 skirted the Basin, either to the north or to the south. Those going 

 north reached the coast by following the Snake River and the 

 Columbia; those that went south had to make a dash across the 

 foothills of the Arizona mountains to southern California. 

 Although a few bold souls ventured out onto this terrifyingly dry 

 and seemingly endless region by a process of lake-hopping, it was 

 not until the great Mormon migration that it was really colonized 

 or even penetrated. 



A glance at any physical atlas will quickly show why this 

 province was left till the last by settlers, for it is a desert in every 

 sense of that word. Even a physical map does not make clear 

 that the rather numerous lakes dotting its northern, western, and 

 eastern edges, and especially those clustering at its center, are 

 of no use to travelers, for almost all of them are either saline or 

 alkaline. Political maps are no more useful, though they do 

 reveal a dearth of roads, towns, and place names. Only a visit to 

 this province will demonstrate that while most of its surface is 

 relieved by some variation of topography, it is as sterile in 

 appearance as one could expect any land to be. The whole place 

 is undeniably a desert. But is it a "Desert"? 



WHAT IS A DESERT? 



This is one of the most troublesome geographical questions that 

 can be asked. Nonetheless, it must be asked and, if possible, 

 answered. For sooner or later, every Easterner who crosses the 

 hundredth meridian asks it: and every Westerner gives a different 



answer; and all foreigners, including even Mexicans, will prob- 

 ably disagree with all the answers. The trouble is not just geo- 

 graphic or even phytogeographic, but semantic, and profoundly to. 



The word "desert" does not mean the same thing to Ameri- 

 cans as it does to Englishmen, or even to Canadians, Australians, 

 and other English-speaking peoples. To each of these it means 

 something different, and to all of them something other than the 

 word desierto means to Spaniards. According to Webster, 

 "desert" denotes "a deserted region; a region left unoccupied"; 

 and as a second choice, "an arid region lacking moisture to sup- 

 port vegetation." The Oxford Dictionary, on the other hand, 

 ignores the connotation of desertion or abandonment and gives 

 simply "uninhabited, desolate; uncultivated, barren," and leaves 

 it at that. 



Now it so happened that the Spanish got to the American 

 "deserts" first. They hailed from a cold, upland, wind-blown kind 

 of desert, and they carried their term to the New World and 

 applied it to both the altoplano of the Andes and the uplands of 

 central Mexico. Later, when they went north into theChihuahuan 

 and Sonoran regions, they applied this term to those regions as 

 well. The Anglo-Saxons, however, having no deserts in their 

 homelands, brought with them a traditional concept of deserts as 

 being endless, completely vegetationless sand dunes such as are 

 found in some parts of the Sahara. And this is how they 

 naturally pictured the desiertos of the Spaniards, and what they 

 therefore expected to find covering the whole Southwest. The 

 notion has persisted, so that Easterners arriving in California 

 via Route 66 may even now be heard inquiring what happened 

 to the Mojave Desert. 



None of these definitions has any real validity. A desert is not 

 necessarily a deserted place, and it need never have been 

 deserted by either plants or animals or men; and it is seldom 

 unoccupied by all three of them. Moreover, it is only in some 

 cases an arid region — therefore necessarily moistureless — but 

 hardly if ever so lacking in this respect as to be unable to sup- 

 port life. In fact, deserts swarm with life. Only moving sand 

 dunes are more or less sterile, but even in the midst of large 

 areas of these (see the White Sands of the Tularosa Basin, for 

 instance) there may be some vegetation and a good deal of 

 animal life. 



The geographer sees deserts as comparatively dry places, or 

 rather places that receive little rainfall — the polar deserts being 

 waterlogged, as we have seen. The geologists separate hot from 

 cold deserts — the first as areas where subaerial action dominates 

 and hydrodynamic factors are at a minimum, and where red- 

 colored soils and deposits predominate: the second as places 

 where precipitation is low but the ground is frozen. To botanists 

 and zoologists, deserts are regions where certain environmental 

 features differ from those of all other regions and where plants 

 and animals of certain kinds and special structures live. To the 

 vegetationist — which is to say. us— there are three kinds of 

 deserts — polar, montane, and torrid. These have no common 

 features. The polar is cold, has a low rainfall, but is waterlogged; 

 the montane is cold, has a high precipitation as a rule, and 

 usually has moist soils; the torrid is hot. with a very low rainfall 

 and almost no ground moisture. 



The only way these three types of deserts can be defined is by 

 reference to their position in the sequence of the major vegeta- 

 tional belts. And. by this token, the Hot Deserts are those lands 



Salt flats bordering Great Salt Lake in the Great Basin area. 

 These deposits are over ten feet deep and cover hundreds 

 of square miles of former lake bottom. 



230 



