The Desert that Never Quits

It was so lovely out today.  Nearly 70, in Michigan, in March!  Needless to say, I felt weather inspired, so try this on for size:

The weather in the Mojave desert has been weird, to say the least, for the last seven years or so.  In 2005, many of the salt flats throughout the region were full of water that persisted well into the summer, including Badwater Basin at Death Valley, which ordinarily receives a meager 2 inches of rain a year.  In the winter of 2008-2009, several feet of snow fell throughout all but the lowest elevations of the desert.  Joshua trees and California fan palms were covered in snow and ice, and things got bad enough in places that interstate 15 had to close a few times.  This past late June, things were still on the wet and cool side, as the below picture will demonstrate.

Normally, by this time of year, temperatures would be hitting the triple digits and there would be not a cloud in the sky.  The ground would be bare, except for the creosote bushes (Larrea Tridentata).  Instead you can see that there was still grass everywhere, the sky was overcast, and I can assure you that temperatures were hovering in the upper forties, at midday no less.  The strangest thing had to be that while the sky was misting, and even raining pretty steady in some parts, the desert was not about to give up its superiority to uppity weather patterns.  Dust storms were blowing across the flats even as the sky opened up and had been soaking sand back into something that was not quite soil.

As you can see, the camera was wet, and it was raining both over me and in the right foreground, where the dust was also kicking up and some of that surviving winter grass cover was getting covered by sand.  That's what is so wonderful about the Mojave; the Sonoran desert might have the more interesting cacti and other plant life, but the Mojave can freeze, boil, flood, and dry up in the wind all in the same day.  The hottest temperature I have ever been in outdoors, 117F, I experienced here.  The most powerful snowfall, 14 inches in two hours, that I have ever experienced was here.  By and large, the Mojave has otherwise been behaving normally, but the extremes that have been going on for the past few years have been downright strange.  Nevertheless, the desert here likes to resist change, and even when it has been a bit greener or browner than normal, the flora and landscape have hardly given in.  The locals certainly know it; this remains one of the most sparsely populated areas of the United States, right next to one of the mostly densely packed urban regions on the entire planet.