A peaceful moment for us today

He'd always had a quickening of the heart when he crossed into Arizona and beheld the cactus country. This was as the desert should be, this was the desert of the picture books, with the land unrolled to the farthest distant horizon hills, with saguaro standing sentinel in their strange chessboard pattern, towering supinely above the fans of ocotillo and brushy mesquite.”
― Dorothy B. Hughes, The Expendable Man


The Sonoran Desert, Arizona, stretches out over nearly 100,000 square miles.
The desert is the hottest in North America but due to the high levels of rainfall compared to other deserts it manages to maintain plant life.