Gearing up: For a project to photograph the world’s extreme deserts, I wanted to visit the giant sand dunes in China’s Inner Mongolia. The only way into the Gobi is on foot or by camel.

As dog stories go, this one about a scruffy little stray named Gobi ... desert dunes, over mountains and through yurt villages in the remote autonomous region of Xinjiang in northwest China.

The photo shows two big craters on a 600 foot platform deep in China's Gobi desert that Chinese military testers used to simulate the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. There has been talk of the ...