The land of Desolation was a Nephite territory in the far north, bordering the land Bountiful to the south. It took its name from its desolate state: it lay so far northward that it ran into the land where an earlier people had been destroyed, whose bones were found by the people of Zarahemla at the place of their first landing (Alma 22:30-31). Limhi’s search party reached the same region while looking for Zarahemla and found it covered with the bones of men and beasts and the ruins of buildings of every kind, evidence of the Jaredite destruction prophesied to leave their bones as heaps of earth (Mosiah 8:8; Ether 11:6). The land of Moron, where the Jaredite king dwelt, was near the land the Nephites called Desolation (Ether 7:6).
The boundary between Bountiful and Desolation ran from the east to the west sea, a distance of a day and a half’s journey for a Nephite, with a small neck of land between the land northward and the land southward (Alma 22:32). A narrow pass at the borders of Desolation led by the sea into the land northward (Alma 50:34); it was near this pass that Hagoth launched his ships into the west sea (Alma 63:5).
In the final Nephite-Lamanite wars, Mormon gathered his people at the land Desolation, in a city by the narrow pass leading into the land southward, and fortified it against the Lamanites (Mormon 3:5-7). The city and land changed hands repeatedly: the Lamanites took the city Desolation, the Nephites retook it, and the Lamanites took it again as their numbers grew, beating the Nephites in a battle there (Mormon 4:1-3, 8, 13, 19). Mormon recorded that during these years the people did not repent but continued in their wickedness, with bloodshed and carnage among both the Nephites and Lamanites greater than there had ever been among the children of Lehi (Mormon 3:5; Mormon 4:10-12).