About 48,000 sq mi · CA, NV, AZ, UT · Death Valley, 282 ft below sea level · 134 °F record
Mojave Desert map
The Mojave is the smallest and driest of the four North American deserts, filling southeastern California and spilling into southern Nevada, northwestern Arizona and southwestern Utah. Death Valley and Las Vegas are both in it.
Where the Mojave is
The Mojave occupies the inland corner of southern California: north of the San Bernardino and San Gabriel mountains that wall off Los Angeles, east of the Sierra Nevada and the Tehachapi Mountains, and west of the Colorado River. It continues into the southern tip of Nevada around Las Vegas, the Arizona Strip of northwestern Arizona, and the St. George area of Utah. To the north it merges into the Great Basin; to the south, roughly along Interstate 10, it becomes the Sonoran. Most of it lies between 2,000 and 5,000 ft, higher than the Sonoran and lower than the Great Basin.
Key measurements
- Area: about 48,000 square miles; estimates range from 25,000 to 54,000 depending on where the edges are drawn.
- Lowest point: Badwater Basin in Death Valley, 282 ft below sea level, the lowest land in North America.
- Highest point: Telescope Peak, 11,043 ft, on the western rim of Death Valley, and Charleston Peak (11,916 ft) in the Spring Mountains west of Las Vegas.
- Hottest air temperature ever reliably recorded on earth: 134 °F at Furnace Creek, Death Valley, on July 10, 1913.
- Rain: about 2 inches a year in Death Valley, 4 to 6 inches in most of the desert.
- Mojave National Preserve covers about 1.6 million acres between Interstates 15 and 40; Death Valley National Park, at 3.4 million acres, is the largest national park in the lower 48.
Cities and towns
Las Vegas and Henderson, with the largest metropolitan area in any US desert after Phoenix, sit in the Mojave's eastern lobe. In California the largest towns are Lancaster and Palmdale in the Antelope Valley, Victorville and Hesperia on the Cajon Pass route, and Barstow at the junction of Interstates 15 and 40. Ridgecrest, Twentynine Palms and Needles are smaller. Los Angeles is just over the mountains to the southwest; Edwards Air Force Base and the China Lake naval station occupy large tracts of the western desert.
Roads across it
Interstate 15 crosses the Mojave from Cajon Pass to Las Vegas and on to St. George, the busiest desert highway in the country. Interstate 40 follows the old Route 66 from Barstow to Needles and the Colorado River. Highway 395 runs up the eastern side of the Sierra through the Owens Valley, and Highway 190 crosses Death Valley. Joshua Tree National Park straddles the Mojave–Sonoran boundary east of Palm Springs; Joshua trees grow only above about 2,000 ft on the Mojave side.
How the desert shaped the map
The Mojave is the reason Los Angeles, San Diego and Las Vegas draw on the Colorado River and the Owens Valley: the Los Angeles Aqueduct (1913) took the Owens River south across the desert's western edge, and the Colorado River Aqueduct (1941) crosses its southern edge. Hoover Dam and Lake Mead, on the Arizona–Nevada line, sit in the desert's eastern lobe. The California–Nevada border runs diagonally through the desert from Lake Tahoe to the Colorado River, so Las Vegas is Nevada's only large city on the Mojave side while every other Nevada city is in the Great Basin.
Related maps
- US deserts — all four compared.
- Sonoran Desert · Sierra Nevada · Colorado River.
- California map · Nevada map · All geography maps.