Month: March 2015

Tornado Season

IMG_1865This mushroom-cloud-like behemoth is one of the year’s first thunderstorms for the area. A series of them moved through this past Wednesday and Thursday, bringing some solid rainfall and a handful of tornadoes. Here in Fayetteville, the storms seemed oddly fractured; I could see this cell just to the south and another to the north, while my apartment complex stayed completely dry. Tornado season has made its entrance.

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This first salvo came just as northwest Arkansas’ individual tornado season starts; according to a nifty website called the Tornado History Project, about half of Washington and Benton counties’ tornadoes in the past 65 years happened in either April or May. I’m working on a story now about the area’s history and vulnerability with twisters; apparently Fayetteville has a bit of a local belief that the town’s immune to tornadoes thanks to its hilly terrain. Lincoln, Nebraska, has that myth, too. We’ll see how true it ends up being here.

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IMG_1891On the positive side, the storms also mean spring is here for real, dang it. I had to remind myself this week we’re finally past the slips back below freezing. Let me find some wood to knock on.

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IMG_7899I went down to our capital for the first time Thursday for work. Little Rock’s like a mix of Lincoln and Omaha. The weather was mostly a flat gray, and I don’t have much to show for the visit as far as images, but the day started with one beautiful sunrise.

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IMG_7919One last thing: a crescent Moon and Venus passed near each other in the sky a week ago, a nice bookend to a similar alignment between the Moon and Jupiter back in February. A little reminder to keep looking up.

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Dan

The Dunes: Homebound

IMG_1787We left San Luis Valley as the sunrise splashed the mountains with orange heading for the plains, but before all of that, we stopped at the Raton-Clayton volcanic field in the northeast corner of New Mexico. Lava flows, lava domes like the one above and extinct volcanoes cover about 8,000 square miles there, according to the National Park Service’s helpful pamphlet. Capulin Volcano, a nicely symmetrical cinder cone that’s designated a national monument, is just a couple miles off the highway. Capulin last erupted about 60,000 years ago, or around the time humans first ventured past the edge of Africa, for anyone keeping track. We walked down into its crater.

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IMG_1784The rest of the field started forming 9 million years ago, or several million years before mammoths and saber-tooth tigers first appeared. I keep coming back to the ages of these places because they’re astounding. That volcano is about five times as old as human agriculture but could be just one-seventh as old as the Great Sand Dunes. The dunes, meanwhile, could be several times the age of the human species yet are essentially the age of kindergartners when compared to this lava field, which is itself an afterthought in the entire Rocky Mountain range.

Anyway, much was the same in Oklahoma’s flatness: the oddly abandoned towns, the enormous piles of hay, the bridges over creeks running dry. But unlike the first drive, we passed about a dozen stationary trains alongside the road; early in them orning I’d heard something about a train-truck collision along U.S. 25 on the radio and figured that was the reason, but it must have been a minor accident, because I can’t find a single news story on it.

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IMG_1790Later, a massive cloud of smoke appeared like a haze along the horizon, coming from near Woodward, Oklahoma. Here it is from the west, looming over some wind turbines for scale:

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IMG_1805I could still see the smoke 100 miles east of the grass fire responsible, blasted northeast by Oklahoma wind. The fire had burned about 35 square miles by Thursday, and the cause was still unclear. No one was hurt, though.

The last landmark we passed in sunlight was Tulsa. We were back in northwest Arkansas around 9 p.m.

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IMG_1811Being back home felt strange; driving across the panhandle, I had to make sure I had enough gas between towns, especially since some were empty, while in the dunes, I had to make sure I had enough food and water in case of delays and that I stayed hydrated. I realized in Fayetteville I didn’t have to do either anymore.

As a side-note, if you have a tight budget and don’t mind a long drive, road trips to national parks or anywhere else can be worth it. Hotel, food and gas for this trip cost about the same as one plane ticket. And just think of everything I would have missed if I had flown. It was all worth it.

Thanks for looking and reading, everybody.

 

The Dunes: Day 2

There are no trails in the Great Sand Dunes; a hiker can only choose a direction and try to find the simplest path in a maze with infinite solutions.

I thought about that as we headed to High Dune again Sunday morning. High Dune is K2 in these sand Himalayas, second place. Star Dune is Everest. It stands about 50 feet taller and twice as far into the dune field. Star Dune’s name also refers to any dune that shares its starfish-like shape, carved by equally strong winds from several directions. You can see it on Google Maps, a conspicuously large mound a little more than a mile west of High Dune.

Long-legged kangaroo rats, the dune field’s only native mammal, had been busy the night before. They had a much easier time climbing than humans.

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IMG_1664Lunch was on High Dune after two hours of hiking. From there we could see Star Dune right between two shorter peaks. Behind us people’s footsteps had left hundreds of trails. Only a couple of trails went further in.

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IMG_1692The sand screwed with my depth perception; dunes were always farther than they looked, until they were the opposite. The brownish-gray walls swallowed more and more of the horizon as we made our way, High Dune dipping in and out of sight. We were probably the only people for miles. The utter quiet and stillness of the dune field pushed on my ears. I vaguely considered how someone could lose his mind in here.

The valley directly under Star Dune was full of grasses and light tracks: a kangaroo rat city come nightfall.

More than three hours in.

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IMG_1713We zigzagged with me in the lead up a 45-degree slope to the final main ridge, and I noticed my raised heart rate wasn’t just from the climb. I was anxious. Straight forward was a featureless swell of sand. Above that was a line between sand and sky that could’ve been 20 feet away or a mile. I stood on unstable ground that surely could collapse beneath my feet, sending me falling, falling all the way down with no foothold to stop me.

I halted after each diagonal, recharging my legs for a few seconds and orienting myself to Ryan, the mountains, the clouds.

A few times I accepted that we might not make it. We might have to turn around. Our progress was slow. Each zigzag moved us up 10 feet or so.

We eventually reached the ridge and, surprise, found the trail of an earlier human visitor, a comfort after the emptiness. Our goal was waiting to the north. It was a relatively easy stroll along the level ridge until the very last obstacle, a 30- or 40-foot wall of sand.

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IMG_1717The loose sand was so steep each step fell back nearly as much as it gained. I leaned forward to use my hands, moving a few seconds at a time before my palms got too hot in the burning sand. My legs were sore, and my heart was pounding. Damn it.  Finish this, I thought with my jaw clenched. I scrambled the last 10 feet as fast as I could.

At last, after almost five hours of hiking, we had made it. I could hardly stand with the tiredness and height, but we were there. I think my eyes got a little damp. We stayed for a few minutes and snapped some photos. We made it.

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IMG_1720The highest point in the Great Sand Dunes, facing northwest. The next photo is facing about 150 degrees to the right.

IMG_1725Going down was easy, our feet gliding through the sand as it gave way beneath us. The valley gave us a clear shot out of the dune field and to grass and easier hills, but we had to trudge a couple more miles to get back to our starting point.

The valley walls had a sparse beauty, and the shadows were perfect as we walked by. We weren’t terribly sweaty or out of breath – the weather this weekend was beautiful, 60-some degrees – but our legs were nearing complete fatigue. Most of the gallon of water we had carried with us was gone.

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IMG_1740It was a maybe an hour before we reached the creek, and with the water at our feet, some of our energy returned. The moving water was unsettling to look at after such relentless stillness. People appeared on the horizon, the first we’d seen in hours, with a little black dog. These people aren’t exhausted for some reason, I thought dimly. We were back. We’d seen more of the park than most. I was proud.

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IMG_1756We went back to the hotel, got some pizza and watched TV, a fine end, as far as I’m concerned, to the most challenging hike of my life. The drive back the next day was all that was left.

Thanks for looking.

 

The Dunes: Day 1

IMG_1442The sand of the Great Sand Dunes was once part of mountains that rise almost 70 miles to the west. It eroded and washed down into a massive lake that researchers think dried up more than 400,000 years ago. With no water holding it down, the sand blew eastward until it reached the Sangre de Cristo mountain range. There the sand – about two cubic miles of it by my rough math — dropped and piled hundreds of feet high, though we’re not sure when exactly this happened.

The dunes were so big we could see them 16 miles away on Saturday, a smudge on the horizon tinged blue by distance and the early morning. The backdrop of mountains made them look even bigger. When we stopped outside the park to take a look, a pack of coyotes began yapping excitedly from a mountain to the right, a high-pitched chorus that continued for about a minute before quieting.

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IMG_1457Sunlight had yet to break over the mountains when we got to the parking lot. We were the only ones there, probably because it was freezing. Medano Creek, a shallow stream of snowmelt that girdles the dune field’s east side like a moat, was frozen into delicate shards of ice like I’d never seen before.

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IMG_1465Time to climb. Our goal was High Dune, which stands around 700 feet from base to peak. It’s the second-highest dune in the field and stands within eye-shot of the entrance, making it a popular destination. Might as well, right? We made our way up as the mountains’ shadow moved down the dunes.

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IMG_1544A raven squawked at us from High Dune as we approached, a black dot on the distant mound. It was gone when we got there. Around us was silence, quiet so absolute it seemed to press on my ears. I don’t know if I’d ever been anywhere so quiet. Mountains lined the north and east horizons; behind us stretched the flat valley.

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IMG_1550Other people began arriving as steam was drifting from the warming slopes; first a lone figure striding confidently under High Dune (in the lower left of this next photo), then a group of four speaking Chinese, who waved and called out to us happily. The crowd kept growing after that.

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IMG_1653That was it for hiking, at least during the day. The night sky was clear when we came back to see the stars. I could count on both hands the number of times I’ve seen the sky so dark. It’s almost gritty, thanks to the sheer amount of tiny points of light — the longer you look at one patch of sky, the more stars you see. They were like sand, I thought. The next photo has the Little Dipper on the left, a line from a satellite and part of the Big Dipper (sideways) on the right. The photo after that is facing westward toward the dunes.

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Saturday was for the second-highest dune. Sunday would be for the highest.

Thanks for tagging along!