Sand Mountain

Sand Mountain is a single dune two miles long and six hundred feet high, the largest in the Great Basin, built from Ice Age lake sand the wind keeps piling against the Stillwater Range. The Stillwater Paiute know it as a great snake, its spine the dune's crest; when the sand slides it groans and booms, one of only a handful of singing dunes in the country. A blue butterfly found nowhere else lives on its buckwheat. Below it sit the Sand Springs Pony Express ruins, now off-road country.

What the plaque says

Sand Mountain, dominating the Salt Wells Basin, is a prominent landmark in Nevada's early history. The Northern Piute know it as Kwazi, the name of the snake that inhabits the dune, its backbone forming the crest of the mountain. Captain James H. Simpson of the Army Corp of Topographical Engineers surveyed the Central Overland Wagon Road through here in 1859. The following year, the Pony Express followed Simpson's alignment and the Sand Springs Pony Express Station was established less than a mile to the northwest. Sir Richard Burton visited the station in 1860, marveling at the "hourglass" shape of the dune. The station, abandoned and covered by a dune, was re-exposed in 1976 by archaeologists investigating life at the station.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sand Mountain — 1.9 mi
  Nevada's largest dune — a 600-foot mountain of singing sand, a buried Pony Express station, and a butterfly found nowhere else
• Grimes Point — 15 mi
  Hundreds of desert-varnished boulders carved over eight thousand years — the Great Basin's most accessible rock art

More markers nearby

• Pony Express Route- 1860 Sesquicentennial 2010 — 8.5 mi
• Fairview (1905-1917) — 11 mi
• Wonder — 13 mi
• Grimes Point — 15 mi