Singing Dunes - a photo on Flickriver

Singing Dunes

I’ve always been fascinated by sand dunes, even before I heard them sing.

It had been too long since I’d made a Death Valley trip, so I got in the car early Saturday morning and arrived at Stovepipe Wells at about 2pm. That gave me a few hours of daylight to photograph the Mesquite Flat Dunes. I camped at Furnace Creek that night and headed back to the dunes before dawn on Sunday. A few other photographers were wandering around at sunrise, but just afterwards they left and I had the entire dune field to myself.

Usually nature makes a lot of noise, but when the wind died down that morning it was totally, completely silent. I could literally hear my own heart beating. And something else, too – barely audible, faint enough that I wondered if I was imagining it, a low hum. What was that? A long time ago I read the book The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho and I vaguely remembered it saying something about sand dunes making noise, but maybe that was just part of the story. And yet if I concentrated I could really hear, and almost feel, a buzz in the air – similar to the sound you hear near a power station.

Back home, thinking maybe I’d just imagined it, I typed “sand dunes buzzing sound” into Google and the first result was a great National Geographic article, Why Sand Dunes Go Boom. If you ever have a field of sand dunes all to yourself, stop for a minute and listen closely...

Taken in: United States / California / Stove Pipe Wells (show map)

Taken on: December 5, 2009

Tags:

Death Valley National Park

California

Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes

Mesquite

Flat

Sand

Dunes

Death

Valley

National

Park

Stovepipe Wells

Stovepipe

Wells

landscape

desert

buzz

hum

sing

singing « less

Sets appears in: • Hiking & Camping

Groups appears in: • Death Valley National Park

Camera: Canon EOS 5D Mark II, f/9.0, 1/200 sec, 300mm, ISO 100 (more info) (hide info)

Camera:	Canon EOS 5D Mark II
Aperture:	f/9.0
Exposure Time:	0.005 sec (1/200)
Focal Length:	300mm
ISO:	100
Exposure Bias:	0 EV
Flash:	Off, Did not fire
Exposure Mode:	Auto bracket
White Balance:	Auto
Color Space:	sRGB
Software:	Adobe Photoshop CS2 Windows
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