The Contrast In The Desert

What is your common perception of desert? Hot? Dry? Both are true in some desert, but in other deserts which never get hot, only dry is true.  Some classifies desert as a place where the total annual precipitation is less than 10 inches a year, then, that will eliminate some of the desert we know since they get more precipitation than that. What is considered to be more appropriate description of a desert is when it loses more water from evaporation than it gains water from precipitation. Because of that, the air is very dry. Yet, they can have snow around, just like these:

 Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah

Canyonlands National Park, UT

Canyonlands National Park, UT

A desert does not have be hot, there are deserts in Antartica which never become hot. A desert does not have to be without surface water too, the Atacama Desert in Chile, one of the most arid places on earth, borders on the ocean.
The desert does not have always to be barren either.

Lundy Lake, Eastern Sierra, CA

 Desert's Fall Colors, Zion National Park, Utah

I am not really an expert of the desert, but in my short time of exploring it, I can say it opens to me a whole new world, a whole new beauty, that I before misunderstood. 

Mono Lake, Eastern Sierra, CA

In its starkness, you see a beauty that is as surreal as it can be.

To quote my sister-in-law, while we were exploring the desert in the Grand Circle middle of April 2009, while gazing at the stark beauty of the desert, she uttered:

 " This is so unreal! All that I see are just out of my imagination. Looks so hot, yet it is so cold. Looks so dry, yet there are lots of snow. I never expected to see more snow here in the desert at this time of the year than where we are in Illinois. This place looks like where the alien most likely will land!"

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