page_title: Great Basin Desert
section_title: Central Nevada Bald Mountains
hierarchical_section_title: Great Basin Desert / Subregions / Central Nevada Bald Mountains
caption_attribution_description: English: Toiyabe Range in north-central Nevada, United States. View is to the south from a small hill near Nevada State Route 305.
context_page_description: The Great Basin Desert is part of the Great Basin between the Sierra Nevada and the Wasatch Range. The desert is a geographical region that largely overlaps the Great Basin shrub steppe defined by the World Wildlife Fund, and the Central Basin and Range ecoregion defined by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and United States Geological Survey. It is a temperate desert with hot, dry summers and snowy winters. The desert spans a large part of the state of Nevada, and extends into western Utah, eastern California, and Idaho. The desert is one of the four biologically defined deserts in North America, in addition to the Mojave, Sonoran, and Chihuahuan Deserts.
  Basin and range topography characterizes the desert: wide valleys bordered by parallel mountain ranges generally oriented north-south. There are more than 33 peaks within the desert with summits higher than 9,800 feet, but valleys in the region are also high, most with elevations above 3,900 feet. The biological communities of the Great Basin Desert vary according to altitude: from low salty dry lakes, up through rolling sagebrush valleys, to pinyon-juniper forests.
context_section_description: The Central Nevada Bald Mountains are dry and mostly treeless. Although they rise only 100 miles (160 km) east of the Sierra Nevada, they lack Sierra species due to the dry conditions. These barren-looking mountains are covered instead by dense mountain brush that is dominated by mountain big sagebrush, serviceberry, snowberry, and low sagebrush. They contrast with the High-elevation Carbonate Mountains to the east, where the mountain brush zone is too narrow to be mapped as a separate ecoregion. Scattered groves of curlleaf mountain-mahogany and aspen in moister microsites grow above the shrub layer. A few scattered limber or bristlecone pines grow on ranges that exceed 10,000 feet (3,000 m). The Toiyabe Range (west of Big Smoky Valley) is high enough to have an alpine zone, but lacks a suitable substrate to retain snowmelt moisture. The isolation of these "sky islands" has led to the development of many rare and endemic plant species.
caption: The Toiyabe Range
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