10 Ways to Do the Dunes

Saturday was a beautiful day for an adventure in Utah--warm weather, blue skies, a hint of spring in the air. So after lunch Lizzy and I headed out for the sand dunes, with a couple of cousins in tow. Within a few hours of the Wasatch Front is Little Sahara, a range of wind-swept sandy hills rising and falling like ocean waves, from small 10-20-foot swells to the aptly named Sand Mountain, rising 700 feet above the surrounding landscape. This area is heaven for motor-sports enthusiasts and their ATVs, motorcycles, and dune buggies.

We have none of those machines, but we had a great time at the dunes nonetheless. As I reflected on the trip later, I thought I would share a few tips for getting the most out of a trip to Little Sahara, without the machines...

We had a beautiful day in the dunes, almost alone in the sand.

1. Saturday Is a Special Day: My previous outings to the sand dunes have always been camping trips with Scouts, meaning we arrive Friday evening and leave Saturday by about noon. Friday evenings are crazy at Little Sahara: a long line of cars stacks up by the entry gate, and camp sites fill quickly. Saturday afternoon, however, was a different story. By 2:30 p.m., when we arrived, most of the Friday night/Saturday morning crowd had cleared out. We saw one Scout troop packing up as we applied our sunscreen, but we had no waiting at the entry gate, available picnic sites abounded, and for most of our visit, we were the sole occupants of the large fenced-off play area in the dunes (one of two such areas designed to protect people who dig in the sand from people who drive—loud and fast—over the sand). We spent three hours in the sand and had a blast; any less time and we might have felt cheated, but had we stayed much longer, we might have become bored. [Bonus tip: Avoid Little Sahara on the Saturday before Easter or other holiday weekends; we learned that lesson on a pre-Easter Friday/Saturday Scout campout a few years ago... insane crowds.]

2. Light Up the Night: If you do stay overnight, bring glow sticks for a game of capture the flag. The sand dunes in the dark are other-worldly, with pockets of shadows for hiding in and an uneven landscape that makes running tricky and falling fun. Glow-stick capture the flag is always the highlight of our Scout trips to the dunes.

Kennecott was our model.

3. Deep and Wide: The sand dunes beg for digging, so bring a shovel. Or two. (My back wishes we brought two.) And then have at it. Dig to China, if you must, but be careful that if you go deep, you must also go wide and you should slope up gradually out of the hole. Too many sad accidents have resulted from steep, unstable sand walls caving in on someone at the bottom of a deep hole. For our hole, we chose to make a mini open-pit mine, with a few tiers that could double as chairs or steps or driving ramps (if we had brought little trucks, which we didn't). With Scouts we have sometimes dug a hot tub—a hole with a bench all the way around—and then the boys sit in the tub and we fill it with sand up to their chests.

4. Make Your Own Shade: In midday, not much casts a shadow in Little Sahara. Trees are as comfortable here as dunes in pine-covered alpine valleys. So bring a hat, sunscreen, and sunglasses. The sun beats down relentlessly, and the reflective glare of the light-colored sand augments the effect.

In 2008 I dug a "hot tub" in the sand with some Scouts.

5. Embrace the Sand: Don't fret about sand in your ears or mouth or hair or nose. Or even down your pants. Cuz guess what: it will get there anyway. The sand is everywhere. It is inescapable. Resistance is futile. And, hey, the sand is why you came. So go ahead and wallow in it. Dump it on your head. Bury yourself up to your neck. Take a bath in the sand. By the time you leave, you will be covered with sand anyway, so you might as well enjoy it.

6. Go Fly a Kite: Dunes, of course, are made by wind, and there is plenty of it at Little Sahara, continually sculpting and changing the dunes. Harness all that wind energy with a kite and add a splash of color to the landscape. We didn't bring a kite, but we saw people who did, and we were envious. The wind also means, of course, that your stuff may blow away if you aren't careful. We lost a Trader Joe's bag--along with the badminton birdie that was in it--when a strong wind came up. No telling where that bag is now. Probably Colorado. The wind also often brings a chill, so be prepared with sweatshirts and windbreakers, despite all the sun.

The sand benders of Little Sahara.

7. Jump, Slide, and Roll: Go crazy and play in the sand. Have jumping contests off the dunes. Bring a sled to enjoy a thrill ride down the steeper hills (and to transport your gear around). Make trails down the dunes and race balls down the trails. Throw the sand in the air and take pictures. On Saturday the girls (who are all big fans of the cartoon Avatar: The Last Air Bender) decided they were sand benders and wanted me to take pictures...

8. Be a spectator: Several miles into Little Sahara stands a Sand Mountain, which is almost always buzzing with 4-wheelers and dune buggies, some of them very tricked out. This may be a guy thing, but Scouts have often enjoyed hearing the roar of the engines and watching the sand vehicles zipping up and down the steep sand slope.

This weird bug was first labeled "freaky" and then "cute."

9. Follow bugs: If you watch the sand, you will often notice curious tracks. I first thought they were lizard tracks until I witnessed the maker of the tracks doing his thing: a little black beetle was crawling up the sand, determinedly going somewhere, though I'm sure he didn't know where. These little creatures make amazing journeys across the dunes and I wonder how they survive and where they think they are going.

10. Hit Reed's on the Way Home: As you wrap up your perfect day at the dunes, head east to the small town of Nephi, 45 minutes away. There you'll find an assortment of fast food and other restaurants, and on Main Street you can make a stop at Reed's, a typical small-town burger joint with juicy burgers, big servings of tater tots, and yummy, fresh shakes. As with other such places, it tempers the "fast" in fast food (a trot, not a gallop), but I thought the wait was worth it.

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Lackeous Foodiferous

Suddenly everything was dark. It was as if I was fainting—only I didn't faint. The colors drained out of the scene and I felt unsure of my balance. I stopped moving to let it pass, but it did not pass.

I stumbled up to my Scoutmaster. "I feel dizzy," I mumbled.

It was the morning of my first Klondike Derby: February 1983. I had joined in the laborious construction of a snow cave the previous night—piling up snow, packing it down, hollowing out the cave one small shovelful at a time—but I wouldn't sleep in it because I felt claustrophobic in the little hole. Instead, I crawled into a tent, but I left my boots out in the snow and the rain. Now it was morning, and I was miserable. Cold. Wet. Wearing borrowed shoes. Standing by the fire.

My Scoutmaster—Ole Smith, a kind, funny man with mustache that always suggested he was up to mischief—offered me a sweet roll, but I munched on a piece of bacon instead.

My vision is what I remember most clearly now, 30 years later. The scene in front of my eyes took on the style of an Andy Warhol print—the colors exaggerated and blown out and posterized. A lot of bright yellow and white. I felt terrible. I was sure I had hypothermia. Later, others told me I had become as pale as the snow.

"I feel like I'm going to die," I moaned to Scoutmaster Smith. "Could you take me home?"

My Scoutmaster led me down the trail to the camp medic's lodge at the bottom of the hill. There, in the warm interior, they laid me on a cot and gave me hot chocolate and food. I slowly started to feel better, and soon the medic very solemnly gave his scientific diagnosis: I had Lackeous Foodiferous.

I think of that experience often during the bitter cold of winter, especially when camping with Scouts. In the dark, long, oh-so-cold evening of a winter camp, our instinct is to retreat into our coats and huddle up by the fire. We go into survival mode and avoid doing anything we don't deem absolutely necessary. We just want to outlast the cold, gloomy night, and we stare into the flames, longing for the rising sun and its promise of warmth. We don't want to move, we don't want to take off our gloves to open a granola bar wrapper, we don't want to eat.

The best way to stay warm is to generate your own heat.

This instinct to hunker down against the cold can be counter-productive. As I learned in that medic's lodge three decades ago, the most important source of heat on a winter camp is neither a fire nor a coat. It is our own metabolism. We speak of a nice warm coat, but the coat itself is not warm, of course; the coat is merely helping to retain the heat our body is producing. But to produce heat, our bodies need fuel.

A related principle is that movement—using energy from all that food you ate—generates heat. Sitting still by the fire means your muscles aren't producing heat and your heart isn't pumping warm blood quickly to your extremities. And when it is cold enough, the warmth from the fire simply cannot compensate for the lack of warmth inside your fingers or feet.

As an adult leader on winter camps with Scouts, I have often thought my most important job is being a cheerleader. I am the pep squad, the conditioning coach, the energizer. I try to get the boys eating, to get them moving. Get away from the fire, do jumping jacks, run around, play a game, drink water, eat food. It may not sound pleasant when you are miserable and cold and huddled by the fire, but it's the surest and quickest way to get warm.

The principle carries over into matters of faith as well. The most potent spiritual fire comes from within. In our figurative winters—during challenges and hard times—it is tempting to retreat from faith-building activity or religious effort. We want to hunker down and stop moving and stop eating and wait for everything to get better. But doing so only makes us get colder.

We can survive—we can thrive—in difficult times. But we must continue to feed our souls with prayer and the word of God. We must keep moving, keep active in our religious endeavors, including service to others. Doing so will feed our fire of faith and fan the flames ever larger, keeping us warm and helping us emerge stronger from the dark, cold night of adversity.

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