Colors of the Deserts

The yellow Sahara is the postcard image of a desert. A waving sea of sand. Passing dunes. Date palms oases breaking up the onerous journey. A Fata Morgana mirage appears in the distance. Like no other desert, the Sahara embodies the romantic ideal and lost dream of the infinite. The uniform rhythm of the camel's gait lends the slow trip a certain monotony. Not so the landscape.

As dully, invariably gray as it may appear on first viewing, look closer! It contains so much: copper, manganese, uranium and mica. All uniquely displayed on this "artist palette" of Death Valley. If one magnifies the gray sand, one sees a similarly colorful picture. Contact with the Colorful and Dazzling is a daily occurrence for those living in the Mojave.

Jordan's pink-hued Wadi Rum is a jewel among deserts:rocky and coarse, but saturated with fine pink sand. As astronauts have observed, though the landscape is terrestrial, the panorama is more reminiscent of the Moon's surface. And, nearby the desert is legend-shrouded Petra. Even the entrance way, a narrow gorge leading up to al-Siq's stone-cut facade, is spectacular.

The Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia is an unusual, indeed utterly unique desert, where Earth and Sky appear to flow and fuse together in a fantastic fashion. Its surreal, otherworldly appearance is astonishing -especially at the end of the rainy season, when a thin layer of water covers the area and doubles the visible world.

The Colorado Plateau exhibits dramatic rock formations and gorges. Enormous stone ships lie stranded, totem-like columns jut out into the sky, and the goblins of Goblin Valley raise the curtain on another world. Persons climbing down into the slot canyons encounter astonishing, solidified waves, columns of light and dramatic multi-colored lightshows.