Once you've been to a desert in America and get over the inital wow factor you soon realize that it's very ugly place. It's always brown, sometimes in the spring, if it rains, wild flowers will blanket the desert floor but those are short lived and it's back to being brown. Some people like that kind of thing, I didn't, I prefer seasons, I prefer green vegetation, with trees, after awhile this gets very boring:
The greenish hue you are seeing is more spring type of coloring, most of the time those green shrubs are brown. The picture below is after a spring of healthy rain.
The flowers are amazing to see considering you could go for a decade or more and never see them, then a lot rain falls one spring and BOOM they're all over the desert floor.
Here is a picture of trees:
These trees are called Joshua trees, also known as Yucca trees and for good reason.
The above picture is those green shrubs you saw in the first picture after it hasn't rained, this is the way the desert floor looks most of the time, and there are miles and miles of this ****. The whitish area in the background is a dry lake bed, if any substantial rain falls those lake beds fill up with about an inch to 3 inches of water. The largest dry lake bed is home to Edwards Airforce base which uses that flat area as emergency landing areas usually for test planes gone bad, other dry lake beds are used by wind surfers, places to launch ultralight aircraft, etc. Those dry lake beds set up early explorers into thinking there was a lake full of water only to find out when they got closer it was actually dry.
More brown scenery, as is the next. Most of those bushes are thistles, some are goatheads, the thistles (called tumble weeds) and goatheads get blown about by wind. The tumble weeds will actually break loose from their roots and start to roll across the desert depositing thistles all over the place that create new tumble weeds and can puncture tires, the goathead is particulary dangerous to bike tires as well as very painful if you step on one barefooted. Also out here lives a pest called the red fire ant, if you don't watch were you stand and you happen to be standing near where they live or run, they will attack you and you get this painful burning feeling and wonder what the heck is wrong with my leg, only to look down and see few dozen on you. Indians use to stake people over these red ant hills, and let the ants very slowly and very painfully put you to death. The red ants were impossible to rid of in your yard, you could slow them down but you could never eliminate them.
If you look real close at the edge of the brown and the mountains there are some small whitish dots, those are cars and trucks on some highway.
If you look at the road on the left lower side you'll ee what appear to be dirt on the road, that is fine sand that got sprayed up from a vehicle that got stuck in the sand. The sand is so fine that it's very easy to get stuck in it, many cars have accidently gone off the road and the front end will plow into the sand and flip the car over when the person tries to veer back onto the road. There is also sand that will blow across the roadway which in some cases can make it for interesting travel on a bike especially for those that don't know what to do when encountering sand.
This is a desert Tortoise, they live out there and are on the endangered list, you cannot take one home as pet, they are very docile though they will hiss at you but can't bite you. But the guy below can bite you with serious complications, and they are all over the desert floor and in the rocks:
This guy also lives in the Desert, and they have good size packs they hang out with, they howl, or more correctly scream, all night as they travel about finding food and water, they have been known on a rare occasion steal small babies out of back yards. This one below is a healthy Coyote, must are very scrawny due to lack of food. They're not real smart either, when they see a human they will hide behind a desert bush, except their heads and maybe half of their body may be hidden by the bush, but the rear half and the tail is clearly visible
Sand this very fine, this stuff is so fine that even with thermosealed windows the wind would make the sand penetrate the seals and there would be a small pile of sand every day on our window sills! and if we had a large wind that sand could stay aloft in the air for about 2 hours after the wind stopped! I once saw it so bad that it looked like I was living on Mars, here's what it looks like coming at you, imagine being inside of it! The first time I experienced that I was out driving, my windshield got pitted up so bad I had to replace it, I found sand that had made it past my car air filter so after that happened I replaced the filter with a KN oil based cotton gauze pleated filter and never had that issue again.
Anyway these are all photos I got off the internet, you can find a lot more, but all that brown I showed is the reason I didn't like it there. I did own a house that had 5 acres out there in the Palmdale Lancaster area, and I had created a small dirt runway from which I flew and ultralight off of, that was fun, but regulations on ultralights prevented me from flying over residential areas, not sure why because if I were to crash and burn on a roof of a house I would die but the house would be fine, yet large aircraft that could take out an entire neighborhood were ok to fly over residential areas...weird.
