The Amargosa Desert is located in

Nye County Nye County is a county in the U.S. state of Nevada. As of the 2020 census, the population was 51,591. Its county seat is Tonopah. At , Nye is Nevada's largest county by area and the third-largest county in the contiguous United States, behi ...

in western

Nevada Nevada ( ; ) is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, Western region of the United States. It is bordered by Oregon to the northwest, Idaho to the northeast, California to the west, Arizona to the southeast, and Utah to the east. N ...

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

, along the

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

–

border, comprising the northeastern portion of the geographic

Amargosa Valley The Amargosa Valley is the valley through which the Amargosa River flows south, in Nye County, southwestern Nevada and Inyo County in the state of California. The south end is alternately called the "Amargosa River Valley'" or the "Tecopa Valley. ...

, north of the

Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge The Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge is a protected wildlife refuge located in the Amargosa Valley of southern Nye County, in southwestern Nevada. It is directly east of Death Valley National Park, and is west-northwest of Las Vegas.

. The desert is named after the

Amargosa River The Amargosa River is an intermittent waterway, 185 miles (298 km) long, in southern Nevada and eastern California in the United States. It drains a high desert region, the Amargosa Valley in the Amargosa Desert northwest of Las Vegas, int ...

, which was named after the

Spanish Spanish might refer to: * Items from or related to Spain: **Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain **Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries **Spanish cuisine Other places * Spanish, Ontario, Can ...

word for bitter because of the bitter taste of the water.

Geography

The Amargosa Desert lies at an elevation of about , and includes Crater Flat and the community of

Amargosa Valley, Nevada Amargosa Valley (formerly Lathrop Wells) is an unincorporated town located on U.S. Route 95 in Nye County, in the U.S. state of Nevada. Description The community is named after the Amargosa River which flows through the valley from its origina ...

, (formerly Lathrop Wells), which lies at the southern end of the desert. The desert lies between the

Funeral Mountains The Funeral Mountains are a short, arid mountain range in the United States along the California-Nevada border approximately 100 mi (160 km) west of Las Vegas. The mountains are considered a subrange of the Amargosa Range that form the ...

and

Death Valley Death Valley is a desert valley in Eastern California, in the northern Mojave Desert, bordering the Great Basin Desert. During summer, it is the Highest temperature recorded on Earth, hottest place on Earth. Death Valley's Badwater Basin is the ...

to the west, and

Yucca Mountain Yucca Mountain is a mountain in Nevada, near its border with California, approximately northwest of Las Vegas. Located in the Great Basin, Yucca Mountain is east of the Amargosa Desert, south of the Nevada Test and Training Range and in the ...

and the

Nellis Air Force Range The Nevada Test and Training Range (NTTR) is one of two military training areas at the Nellis Air Force Base Complex in Nevada and used by the United States Air Force Warfare Center at Nellis Air Force Base. The NTTR land area includes a "sim ...

to the east.

Natural history

The Amargosa Desert is an arid

desert A desert is a barren area of landscape where little precipitation occurs and, consequently, living conditions are hostile for plant and animal life. The lack of vegetation exposes the unprotected surface of the ground to denudation. About on ...

habitat In ecology, the term habitat summarises the array of resources, physical and biotic factors that are present in an area, such as to support the survival and reproduction of a particular species. A species habitat can be seen as the physical ...

and an

ecotone An ecotone is a transition area between two biological communities, where two communities meet and integrate. It may be narrow or wide, and it may be local (the zone between a field and forest) or regional (the transition between forest and gras ...

between the northern

Great Basin The Great Basin is the largest area of contiguous endorheic basin, endorheic watersheds, those with no outlets, in North America. It spans nearly all of Nevada, much of Utah, and portions of California, Idaho, Oregon, Wyoming, and Baja California ...

and southern

Mojave Desert The Mojave Desert ( ; mov, Hayikwiir Mat'aar; es, Desierto de Mojave) is a desert in the rain shadow of the Sierra Nevada mountains in the Southwestern United States. It is named for the indigenous Mojave people. It is located primarily in ...

ecosystem An ecosystem (or ecological system) consists of all the organisms and the physical environment with which they interact. These biotic and abiotic components are linked together through nutrient cycles and energy flows. Energy enters the syste ...

s and

biogeography Biogeography is the study of the distribution of species and ecosystems in geographic space and through geological time. Organisms and biological communities often vary in a regular fashion along geographic gradients of latitude, elevation, ...

regions. The seasonal

course runs through the desert, with the rare

Shoshone pupfish The Shoshone pupfish (''Cyprinodon nevadensis shoshone'') is a subspecies of '' Cyprinodon nevadensis'' from California in the United States. It is characterized by large scales and a "slab-sided," narrow, slender body, with the arch of the ven ...

in nearby

Amargosa Pupfish Station The Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge is a protected wildlife refuge located in the Amargosa Valley of southern Nye County, in southwestern Nevada. It is directly east of Death Valley National Park, and is west-northwest of Las Vegas.

of the

Desert National Wildlife Refuge Complex The Desert National Wildlife Refuge is a protected wildlife refuge, administered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, located north of Las Vegas, Nevada, in northwestern Clark and southwestern Lincoln counties, with much of its land area lying w ...

History

Prehistory

It is not known when the first humans settled in the Amargosa Desert. Ancient campsites have been found that date back at least 10,000 years, to the end of the last ice age. Recent examination of archaeological remains in the valley implies more extensive use by aboriginal peoples than had been previously estimated. Pottery and other artifacts have been found that date back from approximately 1000 A.D. to even earlier times. During the nineteenth century, two groups of Native Americans occupied the Amargosa Valley: the Southern

Paiute Paiute (; also Piute) refers to three non-contiguous groups of indigenous peoples of the Great Basin. Although their languages are related within the Numic group of Uto-Aztecan languages, these three groups do not form a single set. The term "Pai ...

and the Western

Shoshone The Shoshone or Shoshoni ( or ) are a Native American tribe with four large cultural/linguistic divisions: * Eastern Shoshone: Wyoming * Northern Shoshone: southern Idaho * Western Shoshone: Nevada, northern Utah * Goshute: western Utah, easter ...

. Both were extremely adept at extracting a living from their marginal environment, subsisting on wild plant foods and supplemented by wild game.

European exploration

The first community in the Amargosa Desert was founded circa 1905 as the result of extensive borax mining in the area. In 1907, two railroads started to service the borax,

gold Gold is a chemical element with the symbol Au (from la, aurum) and atomic number 79. This makes it one of the higher atomic number elements that occur naturally. It is a bright, slightly orange-yellow, dense, soft, malleable, and ductile met ...

, silver,

lead Lead is a chemical element with the symbol Pb (from the Latin ) and atomic number 82. It is a heavy metal that is denser than most common materials. Lead is soft and malleable, and also has a relatively low melting point. When freshly cu ...

and other important mineral mining and processing operations in the surrounding region. The

Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad The Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad was a former class II railroad that served eastern California and southwestern Nevada. The railroad was built mainly to haul borax from Francis Marion Smith's Pacific Coast Borax Company mines located just eas ...

(T and T) ran between

Ludlow, California Ludlow is an unincorporated community in the Mojave Desert on Interstate 40, located in San Bernardino County, California, United States. The older remains of the ghost town are along historic Route 66. History Origins The community settlement ...

and Gold Center (just south of present-day Beatty),

. The competing

Las Vegas and Tonopah Railroad The Las Vegas and Tonopah Railroad was a railroad built by William A. Clark that ran northwest from a connection with the mainline of the San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad at Las Vegas, Nevada to the gold mines at Goldfield. The SPL ...

line linked Las Vegas to

Goldfield, Nevada Goldfield is an unincorporated small desert city and the county seat of Esmeralda County, Nevada. It is the locus of the Goldfield CDP which had a resident population of 268 at the 2010 census, down from 440 in 2000. Goldfield is located ...

. As mining yields and economics changed, the railroads became less viable. The Las Vegas and Tonopah line was abandoned in 1918, and the T and T was shut down on June 14, 1940. By mid-1942, all of the T and T's rails and scrap iron had been salvaged by the

U.S. Department of War The United States Department of War, also called the War Department (and occasionally War Office in the early years), was the United States Cabinet department originally responsible for the operation and maintenance of the United States Army, a ...

in support of

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

. Only sections of the graded railroad bed remain; the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) constructs and maintains hiking trails along some portions of the old railroad bed in

. Modern development did not begin in the valley until the early 1950s. Electric power, other than that produced by private generators, was not available until 1963. Until the early 1990s growth in Amargosa Valley was minimal. More recently, intense growth in Las Vegas has led many new residents to settle in Amargosa Valley and nearby Pahrump. Amargosa Valley is served by the 775 area code, and most landline phone numbers in the area utilize the 372 exchange, following the format (775) 372-xxxx. The ZIP code is 89020. Amargosa Valley is near the controversial

Yucca Mountain Repository The Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository, as designated by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act amendments of 1987, is a proposed deep geological repository storage facility within Yucca Mountain for spent nuclear fuel and other high-level radio ...

, a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) facility on federal land, designed for the storage of high-level

nuclear waste Radioactive waste is a type of hazardous waste that contains radioactive material. Radioactive waste is a result of many activities, including nuclear medicine, nuclear research, nuclear power generation, rare-earth mining, and nuclear weapons r ...

. President

George W. Bush George Walker Bush (born July 6, 1946) is an American politician who served as the 43rd president of the United States from 2001 to 2009. A member of the Republican Party, Bush family, and son of the 41st president George H. W. Bush, he ...

signed House Joint Resolution 87 on July 23, 2002, authorizing the DOE to proceed with construction at

, although the facility was not expected to accept its first shipments of radioactive materials before 2012. The facility's main entrance will be in Amargosa Valley, approximately 14 miles (23 km) south of the storage tunnels. In 2009 President

Barack Obama Barack Hussein Obama II ( ; born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Obama was the first African-American president of the U ...

stated that the repository was no longer being considered as a site for the long-term storage of nuclear waste.

Solar power plant

Amargosa Farm Road Solar Project was a proposed 500-megawatt (MW)

solar power plant A photovoltaic power station, also known as a solar park, solar farm, or solar power plant, is a large-scale grid-connected photovoltaic power system (PV system) designed for the supply of merchant power. They are different from most building- ...

Nye County, Nevada Nye County is a county in the U.S. state of Nevada. As of the 2020 census, the population was 51,591. Its county seat is Tonopah. At , Nye is Nevada's largest county by area and the third-largest county in the contiguous United States, behi ...

at 36° 34' 31.52"N, -116° 29' 35.52"W. Originally designed as a

concentrating solar power Concentrated solar power (CSP, also known as concentrating solar power, concentrated solar thermal) systems generate solar power by using mirrors or lenses to concentrate a large area of sunlight into a receiver. Electricity is generated when ...

(CSP) project, the project was converted to

photovoltaic Photovoltaics (PV) is the conversion of light into electricity using semiconducting materials that exhibit the photovoltaic effect, a phenomenon studied in physics, photochemistry, and electrochemistry. The photovoltaic effect is commercially us ...

(PV) technology.

Solar Millennium Solar Millennium was a German company globally active in the renewable energy sector founded in 1998 in Erlangen, Germany, which is specialized in the designing and implementation of solar thermal power plants. The main activities are site selectio ...

went bankrupt and the project stalled. A smaller 65MW PV plant on private land was proposed by First Solar in 2013.Amargosa may get solar project
Mark Waite, Pahrump Valley Times, September 13, 2013

Climate

Amargosa Valley has a mild desert climate with very hot summer days and mild winters. The hottest recorded temperature in Amargosa Valley is 118 °F (47.7 °C) on July 9, 2002 and the coldest temperature was 6 °F (-14.4 °C) on December 22, 1990. Average yearly precipitation is 4.29 inches.

Transportation

The principal highways serving Amargosa Valley are

U.S. Route 95 US Route 95 (US 95) is a major north–south United States Numbered Highways, US Highway in the western United States. It travels through the states of Arizona, California, Nevada, Oregon, and Idaho, staying inland from the Pacific Coast ...

which runs north–south (NE-SW as it passes through Amargosa) connecting

Las Vegas Las Vegas (; Spanish for "The Meadows"), often known simply as Vegas, is the 25th-most populous city in the United States, the most populous city in the state of Nevada, and the county seat of Clark County. The city anchors the Las Vegas ...

and

Reno Reno ( ) is a city in the northwest section of the U.S. state of Nevada, along the Nevada-California border, about north from Lake Tahoe, known as "The Biggest Little City in the World". Known for its casino and tourism industry, Reno is the ...

, and State Route 373, which runs north–south connecting Amargosa Valley to Death Valley Junction via

California State Route 127 State Route 127 (SR 127) is a state highway in the U.S. state of California that connects Interstate 15 in Baker to Nevada State Route 373 at the Nevada state line, passing near the eastern boundary of Death Valley National Park. The entire lengt ...

Recreation

features approximately 23,000 acres (93 km²) of spring-fed wetlands and is managed by the

United States Fish and Wildlife Service The United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS or FWS) is an agency within the United States Department of the Interior dedicated to the management of fish, wildlife, and natural habitats. The mission of the agency is "working with othe ...

. The refuge provides habitat for at least 24 plants and animals found nowhere else in the world. Four fish ( Devil's Hole pupfish,

Amargosa pupfish ''Cyprinodon nevadensis'' is a species of pupfish in the genus ''Cyprinodon''. The species is also known as the Amargosa pupfish, but that name may also refer to one subspecies, ''Cyprinodon nevadensis amargosae''. All six subspecies are or wer ...

, Warm Springs pupfish, and Ash Meadows speckled dace), one insect ( Ash Meadows naucorid), and one plant ( Amargosa nitewort) are currently listed as

endangered species An endangered species is a species that is very likely to become extinct in the near future, either worldwide or in a particular political jurisdiction. Endangered species may be at risk due to factors such as habitat loss, poaching and inv ...

. Ash Meadows NWR can be accessed via SR 373 in Amargosa Valley, SR 160 near Crystal, Nevada or from Bell Vista Road west of Pahrump. Entrances to the refuge are marked with road signs. Big Dune is a formation of sand dunes, cresting approximately above surrounding terrain. The dune formation and surrounding land is administered by the

BLM BLM most commonly refers to: * Black Lives Matter, an international anti-racism movement and organization * Bureau of Land Management, a U.S. federal government agency BLM may also refer to: Organizations * BLM (law firm), United Kingdom and ...

and is open to motorized and non-motorized recreational uses. Big Dune is accessible from Valley View Road, approximately south of U.S. 95.

Notes

External links

{{Coord, 36, 30, N, 116, 30, W , region:US_scale:500000 , display=title Deserts of Nevada Deserts of California Great Basin deserts Mojave Desert Geography of Nye County, Nevada Geography of Inyo County, California Death Valley National Park Natural history of the Mojave Desert Natural history of Nye County, Nevada