Kelso Dunes

Its a bit of an effort to see Kelso Dunes, regardless of where you live or are staying. You see them from miles away, and as they are in the class of object that is so big you cannot tell how big they are, their apparent size doesn't really change much, even walking on them.

They rise 600 feet above the desert floor, and are a similar height to the Eureka dunes of The Death Valley National Park and the Great Sand Dunes of Colorado, and the third highest in the US.

Kelso Dunes are created by a prevailing wind which starts in the southeast and swirls around to the north before becoming a north westerly, blowing and depositing finely grained residual sand from the Mojave River Sink, which lies to the northeast. Next time I'll take a magnet and see if I can try the trick of trawling for magnetite.

Kelso Dunes are in the class of 'singing' or 'booming' dunes. This phenomenon has been known about for thousands of years, with some of the earliest references about "acoustical" dunes being found in Chinese and Mideastern chronicles dating back more than 1500 years.

Marco Polo described hearing weird sounds in the Gobi Desert, and Charles Darwin recorded when he was in Chile.

The sounds have been variously described as singing, whistling, squeaking, roaring and booming, distant kettle drums, artillery fire, thunder, low-flying propeller aircraft, bass violins, pipe organs and humming telegraph wires. Yep thats quite a lot of descriptions!

The low frequency sounds are produced when closely packed sand grains (mostly made of polished grains of rose quartz) slide over each other, such as an avalanche down the slip (leeward) face of a dune.

The stationary sand underneath acts like an amplifier.

For the movement of the sand to produce sound, the sand has to be very dry. Also the grains are much more rounded and finely polished compared with ordinary (silent) sand.

I took some pictures of the dunes, but what I was most struck by was the still-life qualities of the plants, sand and the shadows they make.