2011-11-01, 02:53 AM
(2011-10-31, 12:52 AM)Verdite link Wrote: Thats a great story. I'm more interested in your own personal experience. I watched a film called 127 hours, it was about a man in Utah, i thought it looked pretty incredible. Ive never seen a desert before in real life.
Pure sand dunes like the ones outside Yuma are quite rare in the USA. Most deserts here are covered with thin, but evenly spread vegetation like cactus's or other drought tolerant shrubs. There's an interesting story about the early road they built across those dunes (where sarlacc was filmed) here. The mountains of sand shift so quickly in the wind, that anything heavier than the sand would soon sink to the bottom so they made a long, chained wood plank road that floated on top of the sand. My grandparent actually drove across that 'Plank Road' on their honeymoon.
Another interesting thing about the deserts here that seems counterintuitive: they actually have floods semi regularly. Rain comes in brief torrential downpours which makes a wall of sandy water called a 'flash flood' that goes cutting through the desert. Most deserts I've been to are filled with dry 'washes' from old flash flood channels and it wasn't uncommon to hear of a house or two getting swamped in a flash flood. These days, they've mostly built canals to catch flash floods and direct them away from populated areas.