Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area

Author's Comments

The first time I walked into the Dellenback dunes I lost my sense of scale almost immediately. There is nothing to measure against. A ridge that looks like a short walk turns out to be twenty minutes away, and the figure you thought you saw on the horizon is a tree island a half mile out. The dunes do this. They strip away the visual references you have spent your whole life relying on, and what is left is something closer to abstraction than landscape. Late afternoon in October is when I prefer them. The summer wind has not entirely settled but the light has gone long, and the ripple patterns the wind leaves in the sand become legible only when the sun is low enough to draw them out in shadow. At noon the dunes are flat and blank. At seven they are a topographic map of every gust that passed through that day. I have stood in one place for twenty minutes watching a single ridge change as the light dropped, the shadows deepening from suggestion to architecture. The wide shot is the obvious photograph and it is the hardest to make well, because the eye needs something to hold onto. A figure helps. A tree island in the middle distance helps. Without those, the image collapses into texture. The detail shots are easier and in some ways more honest - a square foot of rippled sand at golden hour can carry the whole place. Bring something to keep sand out of your camera. The wind here does not announce itself before it arrives.

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