page_title: Great Basin Desert
section_title: Salt deserts
hierarchical_section_title: Great Basin Desert / Subregions / Salt deserts
context_page_description: The Great Basin Desert is part of the Great Basin between the Sierra Nevada and the Wasatch Range. The desert is a geographical region that largely overlaps the Great Basin shrub steppe defined by the World Wildlife Fund, and the Central Basin and Range ecoregion defined by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and United States Geological Survey. It is a temperate desert with hot, dry summers and snowy winters. The desert spans a large part of the state of Nevada, and extends into western Utah, eastern California, and Idaho. The desert is one of the four biologically defined deserts in North America, in addition to the Mojave, Sonoran, and Chihuahuan Deserts.
  Basin and range topography characterizes the desert: wide valleys bordered by parallel mountain ranges generally oriented north-south. There are more than 33 peaks within the desert with summits higher than 9,800 feet, but valleys in the region are also high, most with elevations above 3,900 feet. The biological communities of the Great Basin Desert vary according to altitude: from low salty dry lakes, up through rolling sagebrush valleys, to pinyon-juniper forests.
context_section_description: The Salt desert ecoregion is composed of nearly level playas, salt flats, mud flats, and saline lakes. These features are characteristic of the Bonneville Basin: they have a higher salt content than those of the Lahontan and Tonopah playas ecoregion, below. Water levels and salinity varies from year-to-year, during dry periods, salt encrustation and wind erosion occur. Vegetation is mostly absent, although scatted salt-tolerant plants, such as pickleweed, iodinebush, black greasewood, and inland saltgrass occur. Soils are not arable and there is very limited grazing potential. The salt deserts provide wildlife habitat and serve some recreational, military, and industrial uses.
caption: The Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah
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