Sand and light

An assignment to write about the 22 religious communities that have settled in Crestone, Colorado, took me to the San Luis Valley, near the border with New Mexico. The valley is pool-table flat, suspended at 8,000 feet between two 14,000 foot mountain ranges. Rivers and streams carry broken rock and gravel down from the high peaks, and winds from the southwest carry them back toward the Sangre de Cristo mountains. Over thousands of years, this pattern has built an area of sand dunes that covers 30 square miles and is as high as 750 feet. After spending several days visiting temples, we spent a day at the dunes. Even in a howling windstorm, it was spectrally beautiful. As the sun pushes shadows across the sand, shifts in light and dark create a dynamic flow. The streams and fuzziness along the sharp seams in this photo are grains of sand, carried into flight by the wind.