Journey to Utah in 2013, part 6: Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park

This post is part of a series. Click here to read the first post. To see the gallery, click here.

ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER WONDER OF THE COLORADO PLATEAU

By this point in the trip I'd become infatuated with the Colorado Plateau, especially the Navajo Sandstone with its ancient desert origins. As we left Zion National Park behind, Bev told me of a Utah state park not far away where I could see huge sand dunes. Did I want to spend a night or two there? Of course I did! We drove there – it wasn’t very far, just an hour – and found ourselves in a valley filled with orange-pink sand. This was Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park. Just like most other desert places do, it triggered a dreamlike state in me as soon as I arrived.

We chose a campsite in the sparsely populated campground, ate lunch, then decided to look for a different site, because location is everything when it comes to parking a Lazy Daze. Bev was trying to make her satellite antenna work well enough to pick up the basketball game that evening. Moving the RV didn’t help; the thing seemed to be broken. She gave up, and we took a walk on the dunes.

The afternoon sun was blazingly hot, and the entire valley felt parched. This was a big change from Zion, where the heat had been moderated, in my imagination if not in actual reality, by the presence of the Virgin River. We had no river here at Coral Pink Sand Dunes, just hills of sand stretching far off into the distance, and red cliffs on either side. I’d always found sandy deserts to be surreal, but this one was even more so, because of the vast quantities of fine grit that were heaped like piles of orange-pink sugar everywhere. Plants, rocks and fences lay half-buried. In some places our feet sank deep, and it took effort to free them, as if gravity had suddenly grown stronger.

THE VENTURI EFFECT AND COUNTLESS TINY PIECES OF NAVAJO SANDSTONE

All of this sand is pulverized Navajo Sandstone, miniscule chunks of the Moquith and Moccasin Mountains to the southeast, blown into this valley by southerly winds. If the monoliths of Zion were to disintegrate, they would end up looking something like this. It’s a freely migrating dune field, located on top of the Sevier Fault, on the boundary between the Colorado Plateau and the Great Basin. The Sevier Fault runs right through the middle of this park, dividing it in two. Its movements have exposed a segment of the Moenave Formation on the eastern side of the fault zone. On the western side of the fault, in a reversal of the usual order, the younger Navajo Formation rises above the Moenave, with a thousand feet or so of displacement showing the tectonic activity that happened here. 

Long ago, the Sevier Fault’s violent motion carved a notch in the Vermilion Cliffs (part of the Moccasin Mountains) to the south. This tectonic event initiated the creation of the enormous dune field here, by setting up the conditions needed for the Venturi effect. The Venturi effect is a principle of physics; it observes that a fluid will speed up as it goes through a narrower section of a channel, and slow down once it reaches a wider section again. In this case, the fluid is moving air. Wind speeds up as it approaches the gap in the Vermilion Cliffs, and faster wind can pick up sand particles. When this loaded wind exits the gap and reaches the wider plane beyond the cliffs, it slows down and deposits whatever it’s picked up, making a vast swath of sand.  

The wind blew continuously here, depositing sand and moving it, according to its own inscrutable logic. Signs at the day use area had attempted to explain the physics of sand movement, informing us that the mathematics of dune action were mysterious. I pondered this as I set up my tent among the grasses and trees in our generously sized campsite. I walked away for a few minutes, forgetting to zip the door closed. When I returned with my sleeping bag, a layer of soft sand had already coated everything inside. On and on the wind blew, all night long, but it didn’t keep me awake; I slept deeply in this wild desert world, with the soft sand under my tent.

CLOUDY EXPLORATION IN THE DUNES

I woke up the next morning full of energy and excitement. We had decided to spend two nights here, which meant I had an entire day free to explore and take pictures. As you probably know by now, few things can make me happier than having that, especially when it happens in a place I’ve never seen before. The sky was overcast, and that was just fine with me. I planned to walk as far as I could while carrying all of my camera equipment. I didn’t want it to get any hotter than it already was.

I started out early, following the tracks of recreational vehicles that had left their campsites even earlier. This park is popular with OHV riders, who have about 2,000 acres of it open to them. Lots of people like to go out in the morning and stay gone until dinnertime. There’s a lot to explore in that 2,000 acres. I don’t know what those OHV riders are looking for, but I wanted to find interesting rocks, desert plants, and maybe an animal or two. I wanted to see what the dunes looked like when I walked far enough into them to be out of sight of the campground.

As I followed the path left by those vehicles, my feet got submerged in the sand with every step. Carrying my bag and lifting my camera became a strenuous workout. Sometimes it was like walking in deep snow. But I didn’t mind the effort, because this was a captivating place to be. Coral Pink Sand Dunes is home to bobcats, coyotes, ring-tailed cats (not actually cats but more like raccoons), mountain lions, foxes, jackrabbits, cottontail rabbits, lizards, snakes, and more. There is a tiger beetle species in these dunes that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world. I didn’t see many of these animals, but I found their tracks and leavings. I loved the kangaroo rat tracks the most, with their obvious indentations of feet and dragging tail. The dunes held many burrows that probably belonged to these creatures, often with seed detritus scattered outside. 

The topography changed as I ventured further into the dunes. From the deck in the day use area, the dune field had appeared to be uniform, with similar piles of sand spaced at regular intervals. This turned out not to be the case, once I got closer to them. I began to observe how the dunes varied greatly in size, the taller dunes mostly bare of plants, the smaller hills hosting entire plant communities of juniper and pinon pine trees, wildflowers, cactus, and grasses. I found myself pausing frequently to photograph individual plants, vivid and crisp against the soft ochre sand.

It wasn’t just plants I stopped to examine. There were also lots and lots of interesting stones. These were especially plentiful in the troughs of the dunes, where debris larger than grains of sand tends to settle. The best rock finds of all were the moqui marbles, spherical hematite concretions that form around compacted sandstone balls. Moqui marbles are essentially ironstone. They were created when groundwater permeated iron-rich Navajo sandstone and caused hematite to precipitate in layers. These marbles have also been found on Mars, which has its own iron-rich regions, areas that resemble southern Utah. Rockhounds love moqui marbles, and some New Age types believe that the stones have special powers.

Specimen after specimen was slipped into my camera bag, adding back the weight that was being subtracted when I drank my water. Most of these would be returned to the desert after I'd examined them that night, but a few would be added to my ongoing Colorado Plateau collection.

DEPRESSED AMONG DEAD TREES

Progress through the dunes was not swift, thanks to the heavy load and my continual stopping. I carried on steadily, wanting to reach the ponderosa pines. It was strange to see pine trees in a sandy desert, but there they were, lots them, off in the distance. Most of these trees were far uphill, at a higher elevation where the amount of precipitation is greater. Ponderosa pines can survive on very little water. The ones lower down in the dunes get their moisture from vernal pools, temporary puddles of water that are left in depressions when the snow melts. A few of the pines were closer to the campground, and these were the ones I sought.

I labored onward, uphill through the sand, and reached a place where the land was concave. I skidded down the side of the pit, and as I dropped into it, I felt a strange sinking sensation in my heart. A feeling of sadness had been quietly growing as I made my way further into the dunes, and now it had reached my awareness. It’s the desert melancholy, I thought. It comes from being alone out here for a few hours. It always happens in places like this. But even as I talked to myself about it, I felt that this time was different. The feeling was deeper, stronger, more persistent. It was as if the Venturi effect had operated on my emotions, picking them up at great speed and then dropping them suddenly into this hole.

Trees stood at the bottom of this depression, one still alive, one long dead. Here, many once-living things were now brittle, dried up, hollowed out, disintegrating. I felt a pain in my chest at the sight of them being covered up with sand and dissolving, out of sight and forgotten. I wanted to stay and photograph everything, just to make a record of what was being destroyed. For a few minutes I felt overwhelmed by the vulnerability of all life, so obvious in a place like this. I felt like I was looking at the ravaged bones of the land, and I could hardly stand the sight. But at the same time, I couldn’t get enough of this. I wanted to climb into all the depressions, look at all the dead lifeforms.

I stared at the various objects under the trees here, picked them up, photographed them carefully. Here was the dessicated, weather-bleached scat of some unknown creature containing strips of something yellow and tough. I had no idea what animal left it, or what matter was eaten and then excreted in that form. All the soft stuff had washed away long ago. The thing I was holding in my hand was brittle and delicate. Though I found it beautiful, I had a feeling it wouldn’t be welcomed in the RV, so I photographed it and let it drop to the ground again.

AFTERNOON RECOVERY, SUNSET GLOW

The strange, sad mood sat on me for the rest of the afternoon. I couldn’t identify it, so I decided to let it stay until it was done with me. I ate lunch in the RV and had a much-delayed shower in the campground’s bathrooms. Then I sat at the dinette table and examined my newly acquired rocks. Life being what it was at the moment, it seemed like a good idea to make a watercolor painting of one of my photos, so I did. Switching to a new media put reality into a new frame, as did sitting and resting for a few hours. I tend to forget how to do that on these trips. The sky was clearing, showing bits of blue behind the white. I began to feel better as the clouds parted and my painting reached completion.

Just before sunset, I went out with my camera again. The dunes were different now. Sunlight infused warmth and life into the desert. The largest dune, abandoned during the afternoon heat, now attracted visitors. Their tiny figures on the ridge demonstrated its enormity. This dune is 100 feet tall; it’s called a star dune, because it has arms that radiate outward. Pink sand drifted from its spines like smoke in the whipping wind, and from the ridges of the crescent dunes all around it. This scene was too beautiful to view with anything but pleasure.

Contentment flooded me as I watched the sand’s motion above these luscious curves. The Drainpipe, my 70-200mm lens, was mounted on my camera, and I knew that the skittering sand grains I pointed at would be captured impeccably. I was listening to a podcast while I walked the dunes – I remember that the host was describing low-cost LED lights being developed for use during surgery in rural Nigeria – and I pondered how fortunate I was to be myself, at that moment in time, with that camera in my hand. I have so much incredible technology at my fingertips, I thought. And these dunes are spectacular. Every furrow of sand, every starchy plant cast shadows on the richly hued landscape. The shadows grew longer as the sun went down, until it disappeared behind the horizon and the whole world was lit with a pale orange glow. 

To see lots more photos of Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park, click here.