Great American Deserts

Having just flown across America twice from San Jose to Dallas and Missouri I am struck be the expanse of nothingness here in Arizona, New Mexico and even western Texas. I saw some beautiful but desolate landscapes from 12,000m asl and wondered about the horrendous journeys undertaken in the 19th century by early pioneers. Coming back yesterday I saw, for example, in the space of a few visual frames, empty treeless deserts with barely a blade of grass and awesome mesas and buttes, abutting snow capped mountains (though the snow had clearly thinned with the onset of spring), and nearby a large meandering river - but again with no vegetation in its banks. Alas, my window seat was over a wing of the plane and offered me little opportunity to photograph the scene, so here's a few pictures going eastwards a week ago.

Occasionally, in the middle of the deserts, the exploitation of some river or ground-water resource permitted an irrigated oasis like the one shown here. Likewise, the occasional mineral resources was exploited leaving a large hole in the ground.

Then, when flying over the west of Texas, I saw lots of concrete holes in the ground. I imagined that these might have been missile silos, but that image disappeared from my mind when I encountered square kilometres of wind farms all churning round slowly. I later discovered that Texas generates the greatest quantity of wind-power of any US state.

My final images are not of deserts, but of US cities whose design some purists might term an urban desert.
On the way in to DFW (Dallas-Fort Worth for the uninitiated) we saw urbanism splurging out over the countryside. DFW - which are twin cities - are home to more than 6 million people, one of the fastest growing locations in the US and containing about 30% of Australia's total population. It's not a pretty site! Here are two images of Fort Worth, one showing the city centre and the other a spaghetti junction. The region is criss-crossed by enormous free-ways and entirely car oriented, which is unsurprising given the low price of US gasoline which would make Europeans, and less so Australians, envious. Petrol is only $US 1 per litre or less.

AS