Does British Columbia have Canada's only desert?

Question

Does British Columbia have Canada's only desert?

Answer 1

Osoyoos  BC see hellobc   or tourismbc

Answer 2

Yess it is the only desert in Canada.

Answer 3

Dictionary.com gives these definitions of a desert:

1.a region so arid because of little rainfall that it supports only sparse and widely spaced vegetation or no vegetation at all: The Sahara is a vast sandy desert.

2.any area in which few forms of life can exist because of lack of water, permanent frost, or absence of soil.

Definition number 2 is exactly what you will find everywhere around  Iqaluit, Nunavut. (formerly Frobisher Bay, NWT)

The ground is permafrost. it never thaws, and the wind never stops. A visit there is like entering a world you only saw in film, perhaps science fiction.

Despite the fact that there is not a blade of grass that grows there, and not a single tree within 600km,  for a brief time each year, there is an abundance of  lichen moss that takes advantage of the sun and grows in many colours across the landscape.

The lichen takes full advantage of the summer sun, which melts a few millimetres of the soil, and allows the lichen to take up a bit of moisture, the only moisture it will get for the entire year.

If you walk westward, away from the town, in late June or early July,  you will see the lichen in small patches. It is tiny and fragile and you realize how precarious its existence is, as it has only a very brief time to live, and you feel you must not step on it.

Keep walking until you are well away from where most people may walk and you find it thickens,  until it is like a carpet, and you have nowhere else to step, so you pause and look all around until you are full, perhaps also filling your camera with images, and then you carefully negotiate your path back to town.

You have no worry about seeing your way, because at that time of year you have almost constant daylight.

While you are out there, bend down and look closer. You may  find a purple daisy, which is the territorial flower, its entire head no larger than your thumbnail.

Life is brief,  however, As happens in other deserts around the world, there is plant life. The life of that which grows around Iqaluit is short,  but it is there in almost momentary  abundance, and tremendously beautiful....and then it is gone.

All growth is rushed. The lichen takes up moisture and lives on for the next year, growing very slowly for years. Other plant life has only a month or so to grow  and complete its life cycle before the land surface cools too much and reverts to its normal state, a coarse, gravel-like soil that extends almost endlessly, right into the horizon  and beyond, always atop the ice that lies immediately below.

It is a truly fascinating environment, one only a few Canadians know about, and even less get to see and experience.

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Answer 4

The pocket desert near Osoyoos is listed as Canada's only desert, but that is not quite accurate. As another person stated, areas of the Arctic qualify as desert.

Answer 5

There happens to be 3 semi-arid regions in western Canada. The Thompson River valley (pictured) west of Kamloops B.C.. in the vicinity of Osoyoos in the southern Okanagan valley of B.C. and the south eastern Alberta badlands

http://www.mysteriesofcanada.com/BC/dese...

Answer 6

?    no desert in BC.. more desert in the prairies, like near the town of Medicine Hat and places like this.