The Sahara is epic in every way, a wondrous place  filled with surprises. Winter temperatures can drop to 14 F. At dawn, the dunes wear a mantel of frost, and look like great drifts of snow.

More people drown than die of exposure.  Flash floods strike without warning, devastating everything in their path.The stars are like nowhere else on earth--great carpets of them, close enough to touch.

Click here to see a map of the desert 
of Empires of Sand.

The desert will rob you of your arrogance.  It will wait for you to make a mistake, and then, like the ocean with a careless sailor, it will make you pay.

The Landscape

The landscape is spectacular.  Imagine Bryce or Zion or Arches in Utah--the Sahara is even more bizarre and colorful, as if it were another world.

The Sahara is already as large as the United States, and growing.  It is made up of four primary types of countryside: 

• ergs: the seas of sand; the largest as big as Texas.  Dunes can reach 1,000 feet in height, and range for hundreds of miles.  Yet sand makes up less than one-fourth of the Sahara.

• Regs:  gravel-covered plains

• Hammada:  rock-strewn plateaus

• Volcanic mountains:  abrupt, rugged, and beautiful.  In winter there is sometimes snow.

Sandstorms :

The great storms of the desert rival those of the North Atlantic.  Walls of sand can grow nearly a mile high, and stretch for miles.  Herodotus wrote of an entire Persian army lost in Libya during such a storm.  Tales of lost caravans, buried oases, and luckless travelers abound.