To most people the stereotypical image of a desert usually includes lots of sand, though not necessarily pink, with tenacious critters and a few plants and little else.

Today, that picture isn't complete without the addition of people and their toys.

Funding for the Desert Speaks was provided by.

Desert Program Partners.

A group of concerned viewers making a financial commitment to the education about and preservation of our desert areas.

♪ music ♪ Before the advent of motor vehicles, mountains of sand were an impediment to travel and an invitation to death by dehydration.

Now these huge piles of sand are a magnet for people who want to play.

My friend, ecologist Yar Petryszyn, knows the dunes very well.

The Algadones Dunes also called Imperial Sand Dunes on most maps, are the most popular in the United States.

They're divided by federal regulation into two parts.

The smaller wilderness side where humans venture only on foot.

And, the immensely popular southern section where human presence is permanent and obvious.

Twenty pounds right there.

The tire spreads out and gets more surface and grabs... simple stuff but tire pressure.

Last year we had about 1.4 million people come out to the dunes and visit them.

Another segment of the people use it to go hiking, stuff like that.

But mostly people are here for, to recreate with their toys.

Big kick off season that was Halloween weekend where we see about, oh, 90 to 100 thousand people coming out and they come everywhere.

A hundred, hundred-fifty thousand people, you need to run it like a city.

So we bring in a hundred law enforcement.

We bring in fire.

We bring in EMS.

We bring in over 80 EMS people.

There he goes driving down that slope face.

So those are the pirouettes and figure eights out there and they will last probably up to an hour and a half.

Is that right?

It depends on the wind and if it doesn't rain again.

So, what you see right here might not be here in an hour or two.

Yeah.

Which is kind of, that's how resilient this place is.

We get a lot of people out here in a kind of relatively small area.

It's six miles wide, about 40 miles long.

Most of the people traditionally stay in the low-lying areas.

You'll have some people that will go way deep into the dunes.

But there's a segment of the sand dunes where people go and congregate and recreate.

Just like a lake.

Right along here on the highway is where people kind of traverse.

And you can see where it's kind of whooped out.

It's called the sand highway.

This is where they'll get from this point all the way to the other point.

They stay really close to the highway.

It's a safety thing I think that, "Hey, we're close to the highway.

If I break down, there's a highway right there."

Now the wind prevails then off sort of the Salton Sea out in there?

That's where they bring in the sand.

So later in the afternoon it always seems like it picks up, the wind will always pick up.

It hasn't taken my hat away yet.

Yeah.

Let's all give it a challenge.

Blow ye winter winds.

And then the winds come from the west in the wintertime and then they come from the south, southeast in the summertime and that's how we get these ridges.

You can see these ridges all the way along here.

You get out in the middle there you think you're in the middle of the Sahara.

There's no cars, no vehicles.

People out there get what I call a little "w", a little wilderness experience.

Wilderness with capital "W" is the traditional.

So over here on the north side.

On the north side, which is Highway 78.

It's a physical boundary that shows where you can and can't go.

Predominately the OHV users out there, they understand what goes on out there and they don't go there.

We have very little people going in to it.

Predominate use is on the south side, where we a lot of people, high visitation.

When the 49ers were coming across here, they came out of the Colorado and they saw this 40-mile-long stretch of dunes, that must have kind of broken their hearts.

I think so.

This is sand.

A sand storm out here will get on the highway.

You'll get 12 inches of sand, build right up, and a car coming 50-65 miles an hour hitting that.

Do your windshields get sand blasted?

The vehicles do.

You can tell they get pitted.

But it's an amazing place out here.

Dunes are amazing places because of their beauty and the fun that people have.

On the wilderness side of the highway where vehicles are prohibited and plants grow unmolested, it's animals not people that play in the sand.

Typically, people when they think of desert, they automatically associate it with dunes.

When in reality dunes only make up about one percent of desert areas.

The Algadones Dunes here in southeast California is a very rich dune field, although it's small, contain a great diversity of plants and animals that show the adaptations that it takes to live in such an environment.

When you first look at dunes you think it's devoid of life.

But if you look closely, there's a lot of sign of animals and if you look around, you'll see little burrows.

Some of the animals that make these is the sand cricket, small cricket that's light colored, matches the sand and has this unique structure on the hind feet.

They're comb like and they use that to move sand as they burrow in.

But forage during the night when it's cooler and more moist.

Another animal that burrows and is usually hidden during the day are scorpions.

One unique one here is the giant hairy scorpion.

They'll come out in twilight time and typically at night.

They're predators that forage on insects and other invertebrates.

There's also a number of lizards that are found in the dune areas.

One unique one is the fringe toad lizard.

It has scale-like fringes on the toes.

They expand the toes and these act like snowshoes and keep the lizard from sinking in the sand.

A number of snakes also occur in dune areas here in the southwest.

One unique one is the sidewinder.

It has a problem of trying to move itself across lose sand and has a way of moving sideways so it has width of part of its body to push against the sand as a hold and then reach out and the front part of its body and takes another hold.

So it moves sideways like that.

Sand dunes are formed when wind blows constantly out of one direction.

Star dunes are a little different.

They have prevailing winds that come at different seasons and blow constantly.

That produces the dunes going in different directions.

Some of the biggest star dunes are in Mexico.

Getting out to the dunes has always been a challenge.

The sand is so bad that somebody had to lay down two rows of tires to mark a road to get to the Sierra el Rosario.

That's probably the only way they could keep from getting stuck in this sand sea here.

So to make a roadbed, they'd use what was convenient and that was old tires like this.

Well, living near the highway I suppose they could pick up these tires but it sure wouldn't make for a smooth ride.

Oh, no.

Can you imagine running your tires across this.

It'd be bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bump all the way.

But that's better than being bogged down and sitting there digging yourself out all the time.

It was not my idea of a beautiful roadway.

Not beautiful but effective.

Well, I hope we have good shocks, Yar, because this is the way of all flesh.

And if we can make it over this hump, we can make it on to the rest.

It's hard to believe, but this ocotillo fence and corral was built to keep goats in by an injido, that's a collectively owned piece of land that the government sponsors, oh, back in the very early 70s.

Well, they didn't have much money and so they used what materials was available and what they would do is cut the branches of the ocotillo and then kind of plant em and wire em together to make a very decent fence with spines and everything.

In the early 1970s the Mexican government wanted to have a populaced image so they figured they would offer free land to very poor peasants from the south and this was the land they offered.

And guys would come up here not knowing, say, "Hey, free land."

And they'd get here, they were dismayed, hurt, depressed because they were looking forward to beautiful gardens and lots of livestock.

But what they found was a place that wouldn't support any goats, there's no water between here and probably the Colorado River.

There's no water there, so, terrible place.

They must have had to haul it for miles.

Plus look around, there's hardly anything to forage on.

And even this poor mesquite tree, it couldn't make it.

That's dry.

It's probably because the goats were so hungry they ate all the leaves and finally killed the tree.

In the Rosario, the Grand Desierto, it's one of the driest areas in North America.

Less than three inches of annual rainfall plus very high temperature, extreme temperatures during the summer.

It can get up to 120 degrees frequently.

As you look around, you can see numerous species of plants that have adapted to these kind of conditions and actually do quite well.

Man, on these dunes, the sand is always moving something.

It's moving, it's moving things around it.

It's changing every day.

Look at it fall four feet.

Yeah, right here you get crests and blowouts like this.

Well, so are these plants.

This may be a buckwheat or some kind of sunflower.

Initially this plant had to cope with being buried by sand shifting in.

So the trunk part, root part grows very quickly to keep the body of the plant up above it.

There's a whole array of animals that take advantage of the plants there.

Kangaroo rats and pocket mice that feed on the seeds that's produced by these plants.

And then predators prey on those animals like kit fox and hawks and owls and things like that.

The animals that you find out here have to try to minimize their exposure to the heat and dryness.

So most of the animals are nocturnal.

They come out at night when it's cooler and the relative humidity is higher so they forage for whatever.

There's certain insects that are found on dunes fairly common.

One's the Pinacate beetle and this one you'll see out during early parts and late parts of the day itself.

They feed on dried decay and plant material.

One of the adaptations the kangaroo rats have to get around efficiently and cover a lot of distances that they hop around on their hind leg and that's called salutatory movement, jumping movement.

Although surprisingly the wind moves grains of sand here on the dunes in the same fashion.

The wind causes the grains to hop and it takes anywhere from ten to seventeen mile per hour winds to start this process depending on the size of the grain of sand.

Actually individual grains are picked up by the wind and carried a short distance.

And then as the grain lands, it bumps into other grains and moves it along.

Almost like the old lawn came of croquet.

Oh, look, two different colors of sand here.

Well, this is just a light covering of this really thick white sand.

Look, it's not, it's barely a millimeter thick and underneath it's the regular sand.

If you'll notice, the tan sand is much finer and smoother, more round where the whitish sand is larger grains.

Huge grains.

Huge and more angular as well.

So it hasn't been tumbled, eroded, rounded as much.

It's really young stuff by comparison with.

Yes, it is.

The light tan sand is a real fine primarily quartz sand grains that the source is from the Colorado River Delta area and along the Colorado River here.

Where the whiter sand is a coarser sand also primarily quartz and it's eroded from the granite outcrops and make the mountains here.

It's also more angular because it hasn't been transported as far and the edges haven't been rounded as much as the finer Colorado River sand.

One sure indicator that it's rained in the desert is if you see the ocotillos and they've turned green.

That's true.

They put their leaves out.

Normally they're drought deciduous so when it's dry, they drop their leaves and the branches photosynthesize, you can see that they're green.

Boy, this is a healthy one.

It's a healthy one.

There must have been a good rain.

Fifteen, twenty feet tall.

They can survive when cacti can't cause they just drop everything when it's dry.

You know, say, "Hey, we're gonna go to sleep," and they do.

God, those red fire-colored flowers, that's what it's named for, ocote in Spanish means torch.

It's actually an Aztec word.

So the little ocote, ocotillo.

They're starting to put the blooms out so there'll be a blaze of red on top of those branches.

The tallest ocotillos reach up to about twenty feet.

But that's not all that grows tall in the desert.

The rosarios are purported to be the tallest dunes in North America.

There's only one way to find out.

The GPS elevation reading is about 480 feet so let's see what it is up on top.

Yeah, and as these clouds are coming and going, I hope it clouds up.

It'll be much cooler.

You bet.

It's gonna be a hot climb.

This is characteristic of a star dune.

These knife edges.

If this were solid rock, if you fell down, you'd be cut in half.

Well, you've got your choice of which way you want to tumble.

To the left or to the right.

So it's 600 feet one way and 550 the other.

Sure makes it hard, very difficult to walk.

I need to get a GPS reading right up here.

Okay.

Any guesses how high this star dune is?

Well, I've read 600 feet but it sure felt like it was higher than that to me.

Coming up that slope to get to the top.

Yeah, it felt like 500,000.

.5,000 feet.

Yeah, that's right.

This is top?

All right, I'll get a reading.

What a view though.

Man!

Surrounded by dunes you can see them on both sides.

All right, I've got 1,372 feet and we'll see what it is below.

But if I remember right it was just over 500 feet so that's more than they're saying in the book.

Yeah.

From the very hot tall dunes of Mexico we travel to the cooler friendlier dunes of southern Utah.

Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park is another divided dune system.

Here protected area is small.

This fence was put up to keep vehicles on one side and non-vehicles on the other.

That's correct.

It's about 25 acres.

It gives people an opportunity to walk around and see the same types of things without being directly involved with ATVs out on the other side of the fence.

The sand dunes were established in the late 60s for the people to come and enjoy.

We have a designated campground which fills up quite often.

People come for the photography.

As you can see today, the yellow-flowered mule's ears are starting to bloom.

That's one of our popular attractions.

And hiking.

There's plenty of hiking in this area open as well as a few designated trails.

And for the ATVs, people will bring their own ATVs to utilize the dunes in that aspect.

We have numbers that show 150,000 visitors a year.

We estimate visitors using the dunes with ATVs to be about ten percent.

Then the other 90 percent would be people camping and hiking.

Those cliffs are old dunes petrified by time and pressure, broken down, blown into here to make new dunes.

Yeah.

And the same process..

The sands here at Coral Pink Sand Dunes originated to the south from sand that erodes off of massive cliffs of Navajo sand stone.

The Navajo sand stones were originally huge dunes very similar to the Sahara that essentially fossilized, were buried and become rock.

And now they're eroding again down to sands and prevailing winds from the south blow 'em here and pile up the sand.

So you're from ancient sand dunes to rock to sand and sand dunes again.

If I look through my magnifying glass real closely I can actually see the tiny sand grains that through enormous pressure have been forced together and actually melted a little bit and cemented to form this vast amount of very, very hard rock.

The wind comes in from this little notch in the mountains over here and also from where you can see the reddish tones, this is the Navajo sand stone and the way with the wind coming in and meeting about right here, just makes a deposit of sand up through this valley.

The sand at Coral Pink Sand Dunes is very fine.

It's easily picked up and transported by the wind, much more easily than the sand of other dunes.

It has another strange property.

When it's viewed in the early morning or late afternoon sun, it looks coral pink, hence its name.

But in the more direct sunlight it looks just like an ordinary coffee brown.

It might be called chameleon sand.

The Coral Pink Sand Dunes are kind of on the boundary between the Colorado Plateau Desert to the east and the Great Basin Desert to the west.

So you get plants that are associated with both deserts.

Sagebrush, which is kind of a signature plant of the Great Basin; piñon junipers, up on the slopes away from the dunes; here you also get some of the bigger pine trees like Ponderosa pines and Douglas fir trees.

This is 6,000 feet above sea level.

During the winter you get even snow here.

Essentially a cold desert.

During the summer the temperatures can get very high.

So most of the animals come out at night when it's much cooler and that's when they're foraging either for seeds or plant material and then predators on them.

As you look around, you'll see an amazing number of different footprints of activity from the night previous.

Man, there's at least three sets of tracks here.

There's a beetle, lizard.

Some kind of kangaroo rat or something.

Yeah.

You can see it's track coming through here and they look like little snowshoes.

Yeah, but look at the holes dug here.

Well, they're out looking for seeds.

That's a primary food resource.

And they can smell seeds actually buried in the sand and he dug down.

And then you can see him moving away.

He wasn't in as much of a hurry cause you can see the tail drag there but there's two little prints side by side as he's hopping along.

Sand dunes are home to myriad species of plants and animals.

Many of them are rare.

A few are endangered.

Some dune fields are protected by their own magnificent isolation.

Others are magnets for people and their vehicles.

Every day more and more people drive through and over the dunes, placing greater pressure on those small protected areas that the plants and animals require to survive.

Scattered throughout the deserts of southern Peru are spectacular remains of ancient civilizations.

From the air you can learn about the Nasca people.

From the cities, about the Spaniards.

On lakeshores, the monument building Incas.

And in between, there are civilizations on the wild side.

Join us next time on the Desert Speaks.

Season usually goes six months from October 1 until somewhere in May.

Until it gets to hot.

Halloween is a big kickoff season.

Halloween we'll get 100,00 people out here On Halloween is that right?

Just like Thanksgiving is to ski where everyone goes up and goes skiing after Thanksgiving.

Halloween is the unofficial - official dune season.

Funding for the Desert Speaks was provided by Desert Program Partners.

A group of concerned viewers making a financial commitment to the education about and preservation of our desert areas.