  We describe results of optical and near-IR observations of a large
spectroscopic sample of star-forming galaxies photometrically-selected to lie
in the redshift range 1.4 < z < 2.5, often called the ``redshift desert''
because of historical difficulty in obtaining spectroscopic redshifts in this
range. We show that the former ``redshift desert'' is now very much open to
observation.
