Iranian and Western wildlife experts are working together to save rare cheetahs from extinction in this arid, mountainous region, despite a nuclear row between their governments.
US- and British-based conservation groups are backing a campaign spearheaded by Iran's Department of Environment (DoE) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to prevent the endangered Asiatic cheetah from dying out.
Iran is believed to host the only 60 - 100 Asiatic cheetahs left in the wild. Some eke out a living in a forbidding terrain of jagged peaks, deep gorges and bone-dry plains in the Kuh-e Bafgh protected area in Yazd province in central Iran.
The sleek and spotted cats once roamed between the Arabian peninsula and India, but their number in Iran is estimated to have fallen by roughly half in the last three decades.
"This is a wonderful case of the urgent conservation needs of the cheetah transcending political differences," executive director Luke Hunter of Panthera, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) in New York, said in an e-mail.
The US, which severed ties with Iran after its 1979 Islamic revolution, is leading efforts to isolate the Middle Eastern country over nuclear work Washington suspects is aimed at making bombs, a charge Tehran denies.
But Mr Hunter, an Australian, said he believed "both Iranians and Americans realise that we cannot afford to allow politics to affect the cheetahs. If we did, we could lose them."
Iranian officials expressed similar views.
"I love anybody who works for conservation and wildlife protection. It doesn't matter who it is," said Ali Akhbar Karimi, a 59-year-old veteran from Iran's Department of Environment in Yazd province.
Until the first half of the 20th century, Iran was home to four of the so-called big cats - including lions and tigers - but now only leopards and cheetahs remain.
The Asiatic cheetah is closely related to its better-known African counterpart, a killing machine that can reach speeds of over 60 miles an hour in pursuit of its prey.
In Iran, cheetahs have been pushed close to extinction by increased population pressure and a lack of resources to protect them, with villagers hunting their prey for food and herds of sheep and goat encroaching on their habitats.
"We need to do something urgent to save them," said Iranian biologist Houman Jowkar, field director for US-based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) in Yazd.
"It is a national treasure."
The Kuh-e Bafgh Protected Area, stretching for 885 square kilometres across a remote part of Yazd, is one of five such pockets of land in Iran where the cheetah still holds out, despite the poaching of gazelles and other prey.
It is hard to believe anything or anybody can thrive in the rocky and bushy landscape, parched brown already last month.
Temperatures here soar to around 50°C in the summer and plunge below freezing in winter.
Mr Karimi said he had seen several cheetahs this year, including females with cubs, offering hope for the future.