The majesty of Iran’s central plateau is never complete without the vast expanses of Yazd’s desert plains and sand hills. Remote from the damp shores of oceans and seas, the province is naturally plagued by a hot and dry territorial climate. Yet the temperature, which fluctuates with season change can sharply drop from a seething 46 Celsius to a frigid polar of –20 Celsius within 24 hours.

There are only two seasons: Long tedious hot season, which starts in mid-March and ends in mid-September, and the cold season, which begins in October and lasts until February. The coldest time of the year occurs in January or February and the hottest in June. Sweltering Yazd summer days may be incommodious, but the traveler will find its refreshing cool nights euphorically invigorating.

Taken overall, one third of Yazd province is flat, hot and dry and except for some gigantic mountains, the whole province is an extensive salt desert land, which resulted from axons of over-Stalinization of the soil. These wide expanses of arid, barren and Stalinized tracts of land are incapable of supporting, but marginal biological activity. Thus, no unicellular or multi-cellular plants or animals may survive in Yazd’s salty deserts.

Among the province’s major and most imposing deserts is the Ardakan, or Siakouh Desert. Often  described as the most dreadful one in the region, it sprawls in a horseshoe shape from northwest to southeast in northeast Ardakan. It boldly intervenes between 1939 m high Heresht mountain in the south and the dark bulk of 2050 m high Siakouh mountain in the north, and serves as a suitable basin that absorbs rainwater and floods streaming down these mounts.

Abarkouh, Taqistan and Darangir Deserts, though not so vast as Ardakan, are the other major deserts of Yazd; and with the Herat, Marvast, Beheshtabad and Bahadoran deserts, they make a third of this province’s desert and saline areas.

Yazd