The Chihuahuan Desert Photo by Carla DeMarco

"As we toiled across these sterile plains, where no tree offered its friendly shade, the sun glowing fiercely, and the wind hot from the parched earth - the thought would keep suggesting itself, Is this the land which we have purchased, and are to survey and keep at such a cost? As far as the eye can reach stretches one unbroken waste, barren, wild, and worthless."

So wrote John Russell Bartlett after crossing the upper reaches of the Chihuahuan Desert in Southern New Mexico in 1852, while surveying the new United States' ADMexico boundary. Deserts are not easy to love, and our own Chihuahuan is especially intractable. It is a landscape of almost overwhelming space - flat, expansive basins abruptly interrupted by dry, bony mountains. Its sweeping expanses seem empty, forbidding, blurred by the blue haze of distance, by searing heat and dust-laden winds. But for those who come to know it, the Chihuahuan Desert is a fascinating place.

North America's largest desert, the Chihuahuan, occupies 175,000 square miles of the United States' Southwest and Mexico, an area two-thirds the size of the state of Texas. It stretches across Mexico and the souther

n Southwest like an elongated hand. The palm of the hand rests where the southern parts of the Mexican states of Durango, Chihuahua, and Coahuila meet, and the fingers stretch north across southwest Texas and southern and central New Mexico, just reaching into southeastern Arizona.

Across its tremendous area, the Chihuahuan Desert varies. But throughout it is characterized by certain shrubs - especially aromatic creosote bush, thorny mesquites and acacias, agave rosettes bearing spine-tipped leaves, and yuccas with their tall flower stalks. Unlike the Sonoran Desert to the west, the Chihuahuan is not a cactus desert, although prickly pear, cholla, and other cacti do grow here.

Deserts are defined by dryness, and the Chihuahuan is no exception. Annual precipitation over the Chihuahuan Desert's spread ranges from 8 to nearly 12 inches. Here in southern New Mexico and west Texas, our part of the Chihuahuan averages around 9 inches of precipitation per year. But the everlasting wind and the searing sun can evaporate up to ten times that much from exposed standing water in a year.

The Chihuahuan Desert is also defined by the timing of its precipitation. It is a summer-rain-only desert; most of our yearly precipitation falls between July and September, often in intense, several-inch-per-hour, gullywashing thunderstorms. The remainder of the year is dry as often as not. Winter brings storms from the Pacific Ocean, that, wrung nearly dry by the time they reach us, bring damp air and drizzle, but very little rain. In order to survive, Chihuahuan Desert animals and plants have evolved a fascinating and diverse group of strategies to live with drought.

Barren, wild, and worthless? Perhaps to John Russell Bartlett, but not to me.