Cold winter evenings sometimes find my SO and me over the TP board, testing each other’s recall of stray knowledge bits. Some of the answers have given us pause, so we now jot them down and go hit the intarwebs after the game to check the accuracy of the TP writers. We looked last night, but found no site listing admitted errors on the question cards-do any of you dopers know of such a site?
A question from last night-in what state is the easternmost desert found in the US? I answered: New Mexico, figuring it to be further east than AZ, CA, and NV.
The card says: Maine. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? Every search I’ve run on Google regarding deserts and the US refer to four desert areas in the SW. Nothing east of the Mississippi River. Checking Maine specifically, yields nothing about a desert.
Really more of a big sandy spot than a true desert (Maine gets plenty of rain), but Trivial Pursuit has never gotten hung up on the details. I’ve run across several flat out wrong answers.
I’ve been there. It’s a weird, not terrifically large area of sand in Maine, of all places (see the links above). They give you a tour on a golf cart-like train. There’s a little museum with vials of sand from deserts all over the world.
I’ve long suspected that H.P. Lovecraft (a New Englander) got his inspiration for The Blasted Heath, that barren area where nothing will grow in “The Colour Out of Space”, from the Desert of Maine.
Yes-I saw the ‘desert of Maine’ search returns, but figured it took more than a name to constitute a true ‘desert’, and disregarded those hits. I’d read of ‘cold deserts’ where less than 10" of liquid precipitation falls per annum, but that still doesn’t apply, given what I’ve read of Maine’s climate.
Near as I can tell a desert is defined as having less than 10" of precipitation per year. I seriously doubt that is the case for the Maine desert. Heck, the coast of Maine which is very close to the “desert” ranks second behind the Pacific Northwest in annual rainfall.
This looks more like an oddly placed dune than anything else but certainly not a desert by any definition I can think of whatever they want to call it.
The question can be read as requiring knowledge of the easternmost part of the United States that has less than 10" of rainfall annually. Such a place may and or may not be thought of as a desert. Certainly, most people don’t think of Los Angeles as a desert, though it is by that definition, IIRC.
The question could also be read as requiring knowledge of the quite trivial piece of information: what state has the easternmost patch of land called a desert? In that case, Maine would be the answer. Such a question requires knowledge of precisely the sort of trivial stuff that TP exists to glorify.
Which doesn’t mean that TP doesn’t get things wrong from time to time; we know they did/do. This just isn’t one of them.
Been there as well as the Desert of Maine. Mt. Desert Island is a well-forested island (containing the resort town of Bar Harbor – “Baahhhh Hahhhbahhh” to the locals – and Acadia National Park (which has no “r” in it)), but in Colonial Times I understand that it was barren of trees, hence the name. It was never a “desert”. But the similarity is pretty close and defensible in the case of the Desert of Maine.
Of course it’s naturally made, it’s the dry bed of an ancient glacial lake. It was once covered in a thin coating of topsoil, but over farming in the 18th and 19th centuries led to erosion, which continued unabated until the glacial silt was fully exposed. It’s not a desert, per se, but it’s not like they just dumped a bunch of sand in the woods.
Apropos of not very much, the other day the BBC Radio 4 comedy panel game Just a Minute had someone successfully challenged because they mentioned a “desert island” off the Scottish coast, which was deemed to be impossible, and hence “deviation”.
I don’t normally shout at the radio, but I did this time, annoying pedant that I am. The ‘desert’ in “desert island” is not quite the same meaning as in “Sahara desert”. Literally, it means ‘deserted’, so a desert island is one that was once inhabited but no longer is.
I hope that person got his or her just deserts[sup]1[/sup].
Going back to the OP, I propose a different, double-sneaky answer to the Trivial Pursuit question: Alaska.
Trivia games often, for the purposes of trickiness, refer to Alaska as the easternmost state. Wikipedia mentions a region which could meet the technical definition of a desert.
So while it isn’t anything that a sensible person would think of, it could be considered.
[sup]1[/sup] This is neither a pun nor a misspelling.
