Today, I went on an excursion to the Algodones Dunes (also known as the Imperial Sand Dunes). What a beautiful and magical place it is! The light in the evening is just gorgeous, and I spent it photographing the amazing scenery as the sun slowly came to a rest. I stayed throughout the night taking photos as the stars and the Yuma city glow softly lit the sky. Let me tell you, the place looks absolutely magical at night. The Dunes, are located in California, near the Arizona/Baja California border. They span an incredible 72 kilometers and run northwest by southeast, correlating to the prevailing northerly and westerly wind directions. They are split into different sections: Glamis, Gordon's Well, Buttercup, Midway, and Patton's Valley, and have been used in several films ( the Tatooine scenes in Return of the Jedi, Flight of the Phoenix, Resident Evil and others).There are many different ideas about how the dunes have formed. One of the ideas is that because the Colorado River flowed through very flat terrain, the course of the river has varied widely over the last few hundred years, periodically diverting in one direction or another by silt deposits left after floods. Sometimes the river flowed into the Gulf of California, as it does today; other times it turned westward toward the Salton Sink. Each time the river diverted to the Salton Sink, a very large freshwater lake called Lake Cahuilla formed.  The most popular theory about the formation of the Algodones Dunes says that they were the windblown beach sands of Lake Cahuilla. The prevailing westerly and northwesterly winds, people surmise, carried the sand eastward from the old lake shore to their present location (which continues to migrate southeast by approximately one foot per year). Regardless of how they were formed, the dunes have been a barrier to human movement in the area for years. Foot travelers before the 1900s would frequently divert south into Mexico, and even the 1877 Southern Pacific Railroad diverted north to avoid them. Then, in 1915, Colonel Ed Fletcher built a wooden plank road across the dunes connecting San Diego with Yuma, Arizona, to prove that cars could cross the dunes. This trail eventually became part of what we know today as Interstate 8. Later, during World War II, the U.S. military began conducting desert warfare training on the dunes, which were then part of the California-Arizona Maneuver Area. Ever since, people have been driving on the dunes for recreation using the first dune buggies and off-road Jeeps (following WW II, when surplus Jeeps became available to the public). If you ever get a chance to travel out to this rich and visually stunning desert paradise, I STRONGLY recommend you take advantage of the opportunity !  

-Jennifer