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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And Be Ye Thankful

A couple of decades ago, I sat one evening in a large assembly hall listening to a speaker I found somewhat annoying. He was the second or third speaker of the night, and the next speaker on the agenda was the headliner of the event. The previous speakers had been brief, engaging, and inspiring; more than 20 years later I still remember one of those speakers and what he said. But this speaker, coming just before the last one, was droning on and on and on about a subject that didn't really fit the theme of the evening and that I found less than exciting. "Doesn't he know we aren't here to hear him?" I thought. "Doesn't he know we don't care about this topic?"

I squirmed in my hard chair, looked frequently at the clock, and tried to endure the talk that got longer and longer. Feeling increasingly irritated, I looked at the stand and saw the man who would be the main speaker of the evening—the man whose time was being used up by this other speaker. As it turns out, that man was Thomas S. Monson, now the president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I looked at President Monson, smiling and sitting calmly behind the speaker who was continuing his unwelcome diatribe, and I wondered, "How does someone like President Monson—a spiritual leader who needs to exemplify Christian living—listen to a talk like this—so obviously off target and so obviously too long—and retain a charitable attitude? How does he not get irritated and frustrated?" And, perhaps more important, I wondered, How can I learn to be more patient and Christlike in similar situations?

President Thomas S. Monson [PHOTO BY BRIAN TIBBETS]

A few minutes later, and much to my relief, the speaker finally concluded and President Monson rose to give his long-awaited address. As if in answer to my unspoken question, he began his remarks by expressing the deep gratitude he had felt for the previous speaker as he listened to his speech.

I remember sitting there in that vast room and feeling somewhat stunned. First, while I had been building up a year's supply of impatience and complaint and criticism for the previous speaker, President Monson had been reflecting, with gratitude, on the speaker's strengths and contributions; my irritation had made me blind to the good in this speaker. And second, I had thought a question and almost immediately got an answer. The answer, of course, was this: If you are tempted to impatience or irritation or annoyance with an individual, think instead of the gratitude you feel for the person and his or her qualities.

Recently I decided to focus on developing greater patience, and I selected a passage of scripture about patience to memorize as part of my effort. The scripture, found in Paul's letter to the Colossians, presents the need for forbearance and forgiveness and charity and urges us to "let the peace of God rule in [our] hearts"—great advice for one striving to be patient. Then the passage concludes with three words that I don't often think of as being associated with patience: "Be ye thankful" (Col. 3:15).

Maybe Paul didn't intend to link gratitude and patience. But maybe he did. Perhaps Paul knew what President Monson knew and what I should know but so often forget: Gratitude trumps impatience. As the perfect antidote for negativity, gratitude can turn irritation, criticism, anger, resentment, and frustration into forgiveness, patience, meekness, and love.

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The Prisoners Shall Go Free

I once had a conversation with a member of another faith, who was troubled that her church taught that you must be a baptized member of her church in order to be saved. She worried about all the people through the history of the world who never had a chance to be taught her faith and be baptized. Although she believed strongly in her church, this one doctrine seemed so unfair because it condemned millions of people to hell, through no fault of their own.

She wondered what my church—The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—taught about this matter. I was grateful to be able to explain to her that although our doctrine is similar (all must be baptized by the true authority of God, which exists only in our Church), we also have a beautiful doctrine about the redemption of the dead.

We believe that after this life there is a waiting period before the resurrection and final judgment. All who have died go into this state of waiting (called the spirit world), where those who know the truth are busily preaching the gospel to those who do not. In this way, all people who have ever lived on the earth—in any place and at any time—will have an opportunity to learn the truth and to either accept or reject it.

Those who accept the truth then require baptism, but as spirits (who have not yet been resurrected and received an immortal, physical body) they cannot participate in a physical ordinance. And this is why we are baptized for the dead (by proxy, in their behalf) in our temples.

Peter referred of this doctrine when he wrote, "For this cause was the gospel preached also to them that are dead, that they might be judged according to men in the flesh, but live according to God in the spirit" (1 Peter 4:6).

To me, this is one of the most beautiful and wonderful doctrines of the gospel of Jesus Christ. It is one of the greatest evidences that the Lord is both merciful and just and that the reach of his Atoning grace is, indeed, infinite and eternal.

Joseph Smith reflected the wonder and joy and praise for God I feel regarding this doctrine when he, after discussing baptism for the dead, wrote, "Let your hearts rejoice, and be exceedingly glad. Let the earth break forth into singing. Let the dead speak forth anthems of eternal praise to the King Immanuel, who hath ordained, before the world was, that which would enable us to redeem them out of their prison; for the prisoners shall go free. Let the mountains shout for joy, and all ye valleys cry aloud; and all ye seas and dry lands tell the wonders of your Eternal King!" (D&C 128:22-23)

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A Gift of Grace for Caroline's Birthday

I awoke at 5:15 this morning. Not to my alarm, but to Caroline. She was in her room loudly telling the world that she was awake and ready for the day. These are her happy noises. She opens her mouth wide, she says "aaaa," and she throws her whole heart into it.

Sleepily, I got up and turned on the white noise CD we keep in the bathroom to try to drown out Caroline's early morning noises so the rest of the house can sleep. Then I returned to bed. But Caroline was louder than the CD. So I got up and went to her room to tell her good morning--and happy birthday.

Today Caroline can be as loud as she wants. It is her day, after all, so I guess she can be happy and celebrate in her own way. Even at 5 a.m.

Eight years ago, Caroline came to earth and changed our lives. There have been a lot of hard times in those eight years--hospital trips, doctor visits, late nights, early mornings, middle-of-the-nights, sad times, puzzled times, worried times, crying times, sick times, and endless messy diapers (fondly referred to around here as doozies--or, in code, as messages Caroline leaves for us). But there have also been a lot of wonderful times in those eight years--giggling fits, cute smiles when we come to her after a 3 a.m. waking, cuddling in a chair, smiling and laughing when we sing "We're so Glad When Daddy Comes Home."

Caroline is a wonderfully sweet girl who, in the last few years, especially, is remarkably happy most of the time. She smiles and makes her loud talking noises. She laughs when a strong cold wind blows her hair or a sudden silly noise startles her. She lays on her bed and gleefully hits jingle bells hanging above her head. She smiles at her stuffed dog or her disco light. She delights to hear our voices singing or talking to her. She giggles when we play kung fu with her. She kicks with excitement and smiles wide when we pick her up. She stretches out her arms and sticks out her tongue and looks around with eager anticipation when she hears the sound of the van lift. She really is a beautiful, sweet, fun girl who brings a lot of joy and love to our family.

As her birthday has been approaching, I have thought a bit more than usual about her condition. She is--insofar as we can tell--physically and mentally at about a three-month-old level in her development. She shows few signs of understanding us or mentally processing things she experiences or communicating her needs; it appears that her cognitive abilities are severely limited. So as her eighth birthday has loomed ahead, I have thought about baptism. Caroline will not be baptized. She is not capable of choosing good or bad, of sinning, and is not, therefore, accountable for sin or able to choose repentance and baptism.

In a way, this thought makes me a bit sad. Baptism is such a huge milestone in our church and culture. It is something we talk about with children for years before and something we remember and discuss for the rest of our lives. I understand, of course, that baptism is not necessary for Caroline, but her lack of baptism is a reminder of the many other milestones she has missed--and will miss throughout her life. It is a reminder that as sweet and wonderful as she is, she has a pretty hard existence. And sometimes when I think about her condition, I am sad. I am sad for the conversations we will not have and the things we will not do together in this life. I am sad for the experiences she will not have and the earthly potential she will not reach. I am sad for the joys of this life that she will not experience.

But as I write this, Caroline is laying next to me on her bed, and she is not sad. She is, on the contrary, extremely happy. A big wide smile stretches most of the way across her face, she giggles, she makes her loud happy noises as she looks around the room. I pat her side and she laughs a big hearty laugh. Her eyes squint into a smile, and she talks to me. She says, "Aaaaaaaaaa!" and she tightens up her stomach muscles, lifting her head and shoulders and feet and legs off the bed, as she likes to do (often when we change her diapers, which makes diaper changing difficult).

Caroline does not appear sad about her condition. She seems perfectly happy with her existence. So why should I be sad? And I am not sad. I love Caroline and I rejoice in her sweetness, her smiles, her laughs, and her loud noises at 5 a.m. And as I think of her eighth birthday and the baptism that will not be, there is a twinge of wistful longing for what could have been, but mostly there is gratitude--deep and everlasting gratitude that she is "alive in Christ." Of people like her, Mormon wrote to his son Moroni:

Behold I say unto you that this thing shall ye teach—repentance and baptism unto those who are accountable and capable of committing sin; yea, teach parents that they must repent and be baptized, and humble themselves as their little children, and they shall all be saved with their little children.

And their little children need no repentance, neither baptism. Behold, baptism is unto repentance to the fulfilling the commandments unto the remission of sins....

For behold that all little children are alive in Christ, and also all they that are without the law. For the power of redemption cometh on all them that have no law; wherefore, he that is not condemned, or he that is under no condemnation, cannot repent; and unto such baptism availeth nothing. [Moroni 8:10-11,22]

Caroline is "alive in Christ." Though she will not be baptized, the Savior took care of her. She is saved--clean, pure, and worthy of a heavenly home. The Lord's suffering in Gethsemane and resurrection from the tomb has redeemed Caroline from the fall and granted her a future resurrection--unconditionally. She will live with Him again. Of this I am sure, and this certainty brings me joy and gratitude--and a desire to be worthy to be with her.

This morning I sang "I Believe in Christ" as part of my scripture study. I waved Caroline's arm to direct the music as I sang, and afterward, I held her in my lap and reviewed the words and message of that powerful hymn. A few stanzas, especially, were particularly meaningful to me on Caroline's special day as I pondered these words from her perspective, as if she were singing them. Forgive me if I take some license in reordering these stanzas a bit and leaving out others:

I believe in Christ; he stands supreme!
From him I'll gain my fondest dream;
And while I strive through grief and pain,
His voice is heard: "Ye shall obtain."

I believe in Christ; he ransoms me.
From Satan's grasp he sets me free,
And I shall live with joy and love
In his eternal courts above.

I believe in Christ; so come what may,
With him I'll stand in that great day
When on this earth he comes again
To rule among the sons of men.

I believe in Christ; he is my King!
With all my heart to him I'll sing;
I'll raise my voice in praise and joy,
In grand amens my tongue employ.

I have often, in my life, been deeply grateful and profoundly moved by the mercy of Jesus Christ's Atonement and its impact in my life. Today, as an earthly father entrusted with one of God's choicest children, I am deeply grateful and profoundly moved by the Savior's mercy to Caroline, by the infinite reach of His supreme grace in her behalf.

I do believe in Christ. He is, indeed, my King. And with all my heart I'll sing praises of joy and grand amens to His holy name. And so, someday, will Caroline.

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