The town of Carcross (population 430) is in the Yukon, Canada's northwesternmost territory. It's pretty much the last place you'd expect to find a desert, especially if you've come to Carcross by way of a road trip. Canada's north is a vast place, filled with endless pine forests and smoke-coloured mountains. A single highway cuts through the wilderness, leading you through towns that still smell faintly of the gold rush: Whitehorse, Carmacks, Pelly Crossing, and finally Dawson.
At the beginning of this journey -- at least, it'll be the beginning if you're travelling from the south, as opposed to, say, coming over the Bering Strait -- you'll pass an unlikely landscape of sand dunes, golden as any Sahara.
Welcome to the Carcross Desert. It bills itself, with peculiarly Canadian pride, as "the smallest desert in the world." Its area is almost exactly one square mile.
Millennia ago, this was the sandy bottom of a glacial lake, and it's never quite recovered the ability to grow much vegetation (though the occasional scrawny kinnikinnick sometimes manages to take root). The wind off nearby Lake Bennett churns the sand, making the familiar wavy motifs seen in much larger deserts.
According to some humourless Wikipedian, Carcross is not "really" a desert since it gets too much rainfall to qualify. But it's yellow and it's pretty, with miniature dunes patterning the sand, and that's desert enough for me.
A tiny writeup for a tiny desert.