EDITOR'S LETTER

Barren? Lifeless? Hardly.

Bimodal precipitation. It sounds like something you'd overhear in the basement of the science building, but those two words are what set the Sonoran Desert apart from the other three deserts in the United States. And most deserts around the world. There are other elements, but it's the rain - a onetwo punch of low-intensity winter showers and violent summer monsoons that gives our desert so much biodiversity. As unlikely as it seems, our desert is wet by comparison.

If you've ever explored the Salome Wilderness, Aravaipa Canyon or the riparian areas along the San Pedro River, you've seen the effects of the rain. If you haven't, read the rest of this paragraph carefully, and use it the next time someone says: “The desert ... eh, there's nothing out there. It's barren, lifeless ... a lot of sand.” In fact, the Sonoran Desert is home to at least 60 species of mammals, more than 350 different birds, 20 amphibians, 100 reptiles, about 30 species of native fish and more than 2,000 kinds of plants in a single square yard, ecologists have counted as many as 20 different wildflowers.

Barren? Lifeless? Hardly. According to the National Park Service, our landscape rivals any other terrestrial ecoregion on Earth, and it includes nearly all of the planet's biomes. There's a lot going on out there, thus our cover line: “The World's Best Desert.” It's not a knock on the Mojave Joshua Tree is spectacular but we have science on our side. We also have George Stocking, who recently went into the desert with his Canon EOS 5D Mark III. In The Desert, by George, you'll see what all the fuss is about.

It's a beautiful portfolio that showcases some of our favorite places, including the Superstition Mountains and Saguaro National Park. One of the park shots, the one with the petroglyphs, almost ended up on our cover, but we couldn't make the type work. Turns out, it works better as a horizontal image, without the burden of words. Plus, Saguaro National Park deserves as muchspace as it can get. It's one of the natural wonders of Southern Arizona, along with the Santa Catalina Mountains. Although you won't see the mountains in George's collection of work, we do have something from Karen Shell. Karen photographed the “Now” in this month's “Then & Now” portfolio.

If you've been with us for a while, you might remember that we've done a couple of these in the past few years. It's always interesting to see how things have changed, but to get the full effect, the new images must be made from the exact same spots as the historic shots. That's not always easy, especially when the reference point no longer exists. That's what Karen faced in the Catalinas, where she was shooting the back road to Mount Lemmon. The sign in the 1945 photograph is long gone, which meant she had to match the horizon - a needle-in-a-haystack endeavor. It took a lot of research before she went on location, and when she got there, she needed a laptop, an iPad, probably a handheld GPS, a compass, a pair of good binoculars and maybe even a protractor. But she got the shot. Just as she did in Crown King, Tombstone, Williams, Sedona, Oatman As you'll see, Karen put a lot of effort into our story. She also put on a lot of miles. So did Tom Gamache.

Tom is a new photographer for us, but he's been shooting for years, and racking up the miles Tom drives a 1972 Chevy Blazer with more than 1.5 million miles on it. “The Blazer has traveled the equivalent of three round-trips to the moon,” Matt Jaffe writes in Two Men and a Truck. “I've ridden shotgun for probably 50,000 miles of its run. During that time, the air conditioning has never worked. Nor has the AM radio. But while I've been hot, I've never been bored.” It was Matt, one of our best writers, who pitched the idea of taking Tom's high-mileage truck on a road trip to the Navajo Nation, a place where pickups are treated with reverence. “Trucks have been a part of Navajo culture for 100 years,” says Harry Walters, a retired professor of Navajo studies at Diné College. “People talk about them the way they used to talk about horses.” In a style that's reminiscent of Travels With Charley, Matt writes about the road trip. He writes about the people and their questions and the stop in Monument Valley, where the Blazer became an improbable attraction - “truckloads of tourists turned their cameras away from some of the world's most iconic rock formations to make pictures of us.” It's hard to imagine something like that, but so is a desert with 60 species of mammals and 2,000 kinds of plants. Barren? Lifeless? Hardly. There's a lot going on out there, and November is a good time to take a look.

COMING IN DECEMBER ...

A 40-page portfolio featuring the snowy landscapes of Arizona. Plus, a few December excerpts from the '40s, '50s and '60s.

ROBERT STIEVE, EDITOR