No, not Encino Man, but Mojave Man!

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For years, on trips along Interstate-95 into the wilds of Nevada’s outback, I would see it there, shimmering, beckoning in the distance, just a few miles west of the tarmac highway in the vast and barely-tamed Amargosa Valley.

Big Dune.

Always in a rush to get somewhere else, I never stopped to explore this exotic expanse of drifting sand that looks like a swath of the Sahara itself got blown into the middle of North America’s high-desert.

But I could merely pass by no more. 

I wanted to impersonate a Bedouin and make my camel-less way across terrain that sank beneath my feet like quicksand, the wind making my tracks quickly vanish, as though I’d never even set foot there.

Forget Lawrence.

I'd be Glionna of Arabia. Man of the Mojave. The Dork of the Desert.

One Sunday afternoon, I drove my rented four-wheel-drive pickup off asphalt Mojave Road and onto the soft sand, past a Bureau of Land Management sign that read “Big Dune Recreation Area.”

I was not alone.

The guide books had recommended taking a truck with high clearance because cars quickly get stuck, sucked down into the tenuous landscape.

My little Nissan Frontier (which seemed a fitting name, considering where I was) slalomed along tracks fashioned by those who had arrived before me, their imaginations also leading them to this unlikely place.

For ages, these dunes have been sacred to Native Americans who colonized the Mojave Desert. They figure prominently in the songs and legends of the Southern Paiute, who believe the dunes are living beings who move and even sing songs.

Five-square-miles in size, Big Dune is among several formations in the Mojave Desert known as “booming dunes,” that constantly reinvent themselves.

They make two very different musical sounds — described as a bass-like boom and higher-pitched whistle — when the sand is sheared by the wind.

Fawn Douglas, a Timbisha-Shoshone tribal artist, told me that the entire area was sacred to her people, but especially the Big Horn Sheep which, as legend has it, sacrificed themselves for the tribe during dire times.

Present day tribal members like Douglas still do dances, sing songs and create art in honor of the sheep.

I now know what the earliest Aboriginals felt when they encountered Uluru, also known as Ayer’s Rock, a massive sandstone monolith in the heart of Australia’s red center.

This place felt spiritual.

I passed several camps of off-roaders, goggle-wearing yeehaws who buzzed around on ATVs, amid the creosote bushes and sandpaper plants. Many crisscrossed my track, or stopped to stare at this ill-prepared invader. 

I must have looked like a skier who had arrived at the slopes sans skies.

I mean, who walks these mammoth sand mountans on foot?

Um, me.

I drove on toward the dunes, which glimmered mirage-like in the midday sun. My truck wheels spinning, I feared getting stuck if I went any farther, so I stopped and turned off the engine.

I swung open the door, greeted by the silence. The roar of the ATVs, was a distant hum. and I figured I better hurry or I’d soon be surrounded and perhaps pillaged by the buzzing hoards in a scene straight out of Mad Max.

Ahead of me loomed the biggest bad-boy of Big Dune, hovering at an Everest-like 500 feet, surrounded by young-adult, teenaged and baby dunes.

And I’ll admit: this Bedouin wore goat-skinned diapers, intimidated by that biggest, colossal mountain of sand.

Instead, I turned my attention toward a humbler challenge and set out.

The first thing you notice walking on a dune is that your feet sink with each step, like traversing powdered snow or soft sand at the beach. The difference here was that I was going up, on an increasingly-steeper incline, that tended to make me want to fall forward, or over to the side.

The crest of the dune formed a razorback and my steps created sandy avalanches that cascaded down both sides. Here in the desert, far from the bitter cold, it felt as though I was tramping along the Devil’s snow.

After a bit, I turned to examine my wispy tracks which, with my bowlegged gait, looked like the work of a duck, or a cane-twirling Charlie Chaplin. But the markings mostly reminded me of those lizards that fly across the Saharan sand, barely touching the granules, which are scorching hot in the midday.

Rather than Saharan lizards, Big Dune is home to creatures found nowhere else on the planet, such as the endangered Giuliani’s big dune scarab beetle and its cousin, the aphodius scarab beetle, whose legacy is listed as “sensitive.”

But I didn’t see any of those little fellas either. The only living thing on this huge hill of sand, it seemed, was me. I felt the strange but wonderful solitude, that gift of the desert, I suppose.

There’s an ethereal beauty out here quite unlike any other landscape I’ve ever witnessed. I felt like a ship adrift at sea, waiting for the next big breaker in a storm, because the sand all around me seemed like it was formed in waves, frozen in time.

My junior peak, while not king of the hills, still presented a challenge. Breathing hard, I took a sip of water, thankful for a relatively cool autumn afternoon, without the searing heat of a Nevada summer, let alone that of the Sahara.

Without the overbearing temperatures, the dunes took on a softer, more sensual quality. But the conditions that created them were indeed harsh; they were formed over time — one spec at a time, eon after eon — by the dirt blown off a bend in the Amargosa River as it winds its way toward what is now Death Valley. 

As I finished my walk, I watched the two motorcyclists come. 

Their machine engines roaring, each standing on their foot stands, the riders charged straight at the biggest dune as if issuing a challenge. I thought they would veer off at the last minute but instead, they full-throttled their way up the sandy flanks to the neck of the beast and, angling to the side, plunged back down again.

They looked like snow skiers propelled by engines, or sand surfers catching a wave, this one the Big Kahuna.

I watched, wondering what the Native American spirits would have thought of such an escapade.

Still, it did look like a hell of a lot of fun.

Then I got back inside my truck and, wheels spinning, I turned my back on these timeless pyramids of sand and eased my way back toward the tarmac.