The California Desert includes some of the driest, hottest places on the planet. There are parts of the California desert where entire years have been recorded with no rainfall. Those places are notable mainly because someone was keeping records. Across the tens of thousands of square miles of diverse ecosystems that make up the California desert, there are entire valleys, entire mountain ranges that get just a trace of rain in a typical year.

And yet there are few places in the desert that are not almost entirely shaped by water.