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Show "Great American Desert" Still Exists THE geological survey has compiled com-piled a special report on the driest dri-est portion of the country dry from every point of view because most of the region even lacks water. The Great American desert, says the survey, may be roughly described as lying ly-ing within a vast triangle. Its base is 800 miies long, lying along the southern border of California, Arizona, New Mexico and part of Texas, and the sides extending northward to Oregon. There is much land within this tract which Is not desert, but nearly all the desert land the nation includes maybe may-be found within these general boundaries. bound-aries. For years the geological survey sur-vey has been making explorations of the great triangle. It has just concluded con-cluded a report on what probably is the driest section the region of the Salton sea. The Salton sea district occupies about 10,000 square miles of southern California, and, for the most part, is as real a desert as the famed Sahara itself. It is possible to travel an entire en-tire day, traversing an expanse as large as some of the eastern states, without with-out hearing a sound and perhaps without with-out seeing a living thing unless it be an occasional insect or some reptilian creature.. Enormous panoramas spread out before the desert traveler. Miles upon miles of drifting sand, baking in the blazing sunlight, 'give one either a sense of vast freedom or of oppression, oppres-sion, depending upon his mood and temperament. And, although the sun blazes, the air is bracing. The nights are positively posi-tively cold. Nowhere in the world, says the survey, do the stars seem so bright as in the heavens above the desert. Occasionally the desert traveler trav-eler comes upon palm-tree oases which look as though they had been transplanted trans-planted from Egypt or Arabia. The survey issues the warning that the tenderfoot easterner must not think that because this desert is a part of the United States, it has all the safety and all the modern conveniences con-veniences of an American city. Quite the contrary. The American desert can hold as many terrors as the widest wid-est sweeps of the Sahara. One of the special fascinations about the Salton sea basin is the fact that much of it lies below the level of the sen. Originally, the Salton sea basin was a part of the Gulf of Lower California Cal-ifornia and was not a desert but a great body of water. A curious fact about much desert land is that while it appears to be devoid de-void of all possibility as a producer of vegetation, all that desert soil needs is water to make it highly productive. The famous Imperial valley in California Cali-fornia is ample proof of this. |