It might not technically be a desert, but saying it's "far from" is incorrect too. Semi-arid climate zones are as close to deserts as you can be without actually being a desert. For recreational purposes in particular, people tend to look mostly for open water or mountains, sometimes forests or canyons. Miles and miles of "scrubby prairie" lacking any of those might as well be a desert.
LA actually isn’t a desert, although there is desert in the LA area. Most of LA is classified as Mediterranean, and gets enough rain (the closer to the coast, the less deserty it is). Lots of mountains make for interesting climate zones.
Minor nitpick as an amateur green thumb, but depending on where you're talking about in southern California, coastal California is a Chaparral ecoregion [1], characterized by a high density of shrubs. A desert has lower plant density. It irks me when people in the Bay Area and LA go full desert xeriscape because a) the plants are not adapted for those environments b) animals are less adapted to those plants and c) the exposed sand does little to locally cool the area, unlike native plants
That's more of a dustbowl caused by deforestation - doesn't have the arid (or semi-arid) climate of a true desert.
The Osoyoos "desert" isn't really arid enough, either.
Deserts don't have to look like sand dunes, they are any area with a low rainfall. Sometimes the plants that are adapted are virtually a forest, but it's still a desert. For example in the Baja California desert:
https://mbgecologicalrestoration.files.wordpress.com/2015/03...
Deserts in the US are not the Sahara - they are large, flat open spaces of hard ground and sagebrush. I'm sure there are still challenges, but if you are envisioning sand dunes to all horizons, that isn't what our deserts look like.
The US has very little desert in the Sahara or Saudi Arabia style of nothing but sand and rocks. Most desert areas in the US are covered in cactus, brush, and grasses.
I’m seriously trying to figure out what state you are talking about. Definitely not California (cities aren’t very near the desert, even Los Angeles is in a semi humid basin), Arizona doesn’t have lawns mostly, Utah SLC wouldn’t really qualify as desert either. So then I thought you might mean Saudi Arabia?
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