Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes

Sand is rarer in Death Valley than the postcards suggest. Less than one percent of the park is dune, because dunes need three things at once: a source of sand, wind to move it, and mountains positioned to stop it going any further. Mesquite Flat has all three. Eroding ranges to the north supply the quartz and feldspar grains, the draft between Towne Pass and Daylight Pass carries them, and the mountains to the south hold them in place across roughly fourteen square miles.

The field contains crescent, linear, and star-shaped dunes, and the tallest rise about a hundred feet, which is modest by dune standards and plenty when you are walking up one. Between them the floor is polygon-cracked clay, the bed of a lake that dried long ago. The mesquite trees that name the place build hummocks around themselves and keep growing upward as sand buries them, leaving bare trunks exposed where the sand has since moved on. Kangaroo rats and sidewinders live here; the tracks at dawn are usually better than the wildlife.

Access is unusually easy for this park: a paved lot off CA-190 a couple of miles east of Stovepipe Wells, and then you simply walk in. Low sun is the whole point, morning or evening, when the ridgelines separate into edges. The dunes stood in for Tatooine in the first Star Wars films, which is why some visitors arrive already knowing what they look like.