Sand Dunes in Death Valley

I noticed that there has been a sand dune meme wandering around the science blogosphere over the past week or so.

Here is my contribution to the meme– some pictures of sand dunes in Death Valley, California. I visited these sand dunes near sunset after a long day of mapping with my undergraduate fieldwork program in Fall 2005. Our instructors had promised we could visit the dunes once we finished working, but by the time we finished we only had an hour or two of light left. So, we had to race out to the dunes, first by driving and then by walking or running as quickly as we could on the soft sand. We spent a few minutes tumbling and rolling down the dunes then made our way back to the vans as darkness fell.