Mojave Desert

The Mojave Desert occupies a significant portion of southeastern California and smaller parts of central California, southern Nevada, southwestern Utah and northwestern Arizona, in the United States.

The Mojave is a desert of temperature extremes. Winter months bring temperatures dipping to below 20 °F (-7 °C) on valley floors, and below 0 °F (-18 °C) at higher elevations. Storms moving from the Pacific Northwest can bring rain and snow across the region.

Summer weather is dominated by heat — temperatures on valley floors can soar above 120 °F (49 °C) and above 130 °F (54 °C) at the lowest elevations.

Mojave Desert in Curious Notions
The Feldgendarmerie, the Kaiser's fearsome Secret Police, maintained in the Mojave Desert one of its notorious "penal colonies". The Mojave fitted the Feldgendarmerie's two basic criteria for locating such colonies - an inhopitable weather and distnace from habitation. Americans arrested by the Feldgendarmerie and threatend with being sent to a penal colony could never be sure if they would get to the Mojave or out of US territory altogether, to Siberia, Patagonia or New Guinea. In practice it made little difference, since in all these places prisoners had little chance of survival.