Location Taken: Along the Trans-Canada Highway, a bit west of Kamloops
Time Taken: June 2010
I am oddly fond of near-desert terrains. By near-desert, I of course mean a dry climate without all the sand and camels so many people expect to be in a desert. This particular area is officially classified as semi-arid, so I’m not just making up classifications out of nowhere.
This type of climate can support plants, but trees are constrained to areas by waterways, like this river. You tend to have a lot of scrub-plants, low laying hardy bushes and grasses. It’s not the best for farming, thanks to the lack of water, but it takes well to cattle farms and irrigation.
It’s also usually really pretty. The low-lying plants let the rock show through. And one of the odd quirks of desert-like climates is how much of the landscape is primarily water-shaped. In climates that support trees, the trees hold the soil in place as well as break up and hide the rock. But in the desert, any rainstorm can wash away a much larger amount of ground than you’d expect. So you get a lot of gullies and cliffs and dynamic topography etched into the earth. It’s fantastic geology, really. It’s no wonder a lot of geologist spend a lot of their time in drier terrain.
This is also great for photographers, mind you. The dry air adds a clarity to the photos that you can’t find in humid areas. And the rock showing through adds a lot of additional colors to the landscape. Combine that with the dynamic terrain, and it’s not at all tough to get interesting photos.
This particular stretch in Canada is particularly pretty. There’s not much desert-like land in Canada, all of it caused by the rain shadow of the Canadian Rockies. There are large stretches elsewhere that don’t get much rainfall, but they’re classified as, say, subarctic tundra instead. The colder temperatures lead to a different mix of plants than you find in other semi-arid zones, and the local rocks have a nice color variety to them.
Not that I want to live in a semi-arid zone, mind you. I love visiting them, and especially love taking photos of them, but I get twitchy when I go too long without it raining. Really, I just need to live somewhere really wet where I can just hop over a set of mountains to go visit the desert whenever I get the urge for some serious photo-taking…
