5: desert dunes

Dear Friend,

I hope that your day is off to a pleasantly memorable start. Will you be at home today? Spending time with loved ones? Watching football? Taking walks? Maybe you’ll be writing a song about your newly adopted rescue doggy? Yes, please, I would love to hear it!

Lots of people travel and camp with their dogs and cats. Dogs are usually on leash. Some cats are free to come and go from their vehicles, no leash, no crate, apparently staying close because they feel responsible for the survival of their humans. (Have you ever met a cat with that sort of discretion)?

“Welcome and good luck!” says nature.

We just spent a week in Death Valley National Park.

A few wildflowers are already blooming. The mesquite trees, too, are flowering … the desert is just getting started.

Every morning, there are new tracks across freshly windswept sand. On the nearby dunes and on a trail a few miles from camp, we saw pronghorn tracks, kangaroo rat tail-sweep tracks, beetle, and bunny tracks.

And... is this your footprint?

Frank took over a thousand photos in 4 days … it was tough for him to choose which to share this week. 

Sometimes it's really hard to narrow things down, after all, what would the dunes be without every grain of sand?

The faces of these Mesquite Flat Dunes are constantly changing. The ridges will sharpen and turn, depending on wind shifts, and we’ve noticed that the shape of the dunes will be different from visit to visit.

If Frank was allowed to fly his camera-drone inside of Death Valley National Park, it would be easy to give you a bird’s-eye view of the various dune shapes found at Mesquite Flat Dunes. When the wind blows from one direction for a long time, the sand will form a crescent shape (the two tails of the crescent indicate from which direction the wind is blowing). Crescent (or Barchan dunes) are one of the three main dune shapes found at Mesquite Flat. Linear dunes are the tall, lengthy mounds of sand, often further shaped when a plant stops the wind-blown sand and creates a curve along a ridge (a parabolic dune).

Star Shaped dunes are formed when the combination of Crescent and Parabolic pulls several ‘legs’ onto a dune …

Like most things in natural science, dunes are as complicated as you want them to be.

No matter what time of year we visit open spaces, we don’t ever tire of the views and the timeless sensation of a sky that goes on forever. It is helpful to spend even a few minutes each day looking up into endless space – a sweet reality check, a reminder that even in the vastness of the universe, every tiny heartbeat is a precious gift.

Thank you for spending these heartbeats reading Tracks by the Post! We always enjoy hearing from you so please don’t hesitate to Write to Us!

With gratitude for you and the positive thoughts you send out into this vast universe full of precious gifts …

Gently Be,

Leslie and Frank