The Camino Real cuts through the Chihuahuan Desert, which lies trapped within the mountain shadows of two great Mexican Plateau ranges--the Sierra Madre Oriental and Sierra Madre Occidental. The desert takes its name from the Mexican state, Chihuahua, which in turn stems from a Tarahumaran word meaning in the workshop.

Stretching 960 miles from 20 to 40 degrees north latitude, the desert's southern end straddles the Tropic of Cancer, while its northern end sits astride the Rio Grande.

Although this is the largest of the North American deserts, covering some 170,000 square miles, it's also perhaps the least known in the popular culture of the United States. It has had no Arizona Highways magazine to ply its wares and splash its flora and fauna across America's living rooms. But its charms haven't been ignored by those who live and work there nor by the numerous biologists of diverse interests who study its natural inhabitants.

Conditions "in the workshop" can be uncertain, with its basin and range topography fluctuating from 1,300 to 9,800 feet in elevation. The terrain is mirrored by the temperature, which can vary as much as 75 degrees in a single day, and by the precipitation, which ranges from from eight to 22 inches annually.

Chihuahuan Desert plant life is spectacular and diverse, and characterized by a thorny-shrub aspect. The desert's boundary is outlined by the distribution of tarbush, a sticky-leaved, black-stemmed member of the sunflower family.

But perhaps the most common plant found throughout the desert is creosote, whose Spanish name, hediondilla or little stinker, recalls the pungent odor of the desert after a summer rainstorm. Abundant along sandy washes or at the edges of playas is honey mesquite, a thorny invader of desert grasslands within the Chihuahuan Desert. Disturbed or bare areas are filled in by the native snakeweed, or by the immigrant from the Asian steppes, Russian thistle.

The names of other familiar Chihuahuan Desert plants bespeak of the struggle for existence and defense in an austere land: prickly pear, whitethorn, horse crippler, and crucifixion thorn.