Aline McKenzie
Published: April 28 2004
In the early morning, it’s as if humans had never set foot here.
Pristine sand dunes rise to 70 feet high amid the scrubby West Texas vegetation. Damp with dew, they’re marked with the tracks of nightly visitors, insects, birds of various sizes, the resident mammals: skunks, jackrabbits, coyotes, deer.
But new tracks are about to take over.
Every day, the dunes at Monahans Sandhills State Park, near Midland, Texas, are open as a playground for people. Both locals and out-of-towners come to “sandboard” down their slopes, riding rented plastic disks, wheelless skateboards, and sandboards both homemade and professionally constructed.
The first people arrive shortly after the park opens at 8 a.m., to enjoy the cool before the afternoon heat strikes.
The Massey family, from Bangs in Brown County, Texas, is enjoying the chance for their three children to frolic in the sand. Brandon, 8, and Keelan, 3, are riding disks, leaving long gouges down the dune.
Logan, 18 months, is doing things his own way. He crawls down the dune backward, leaving a smooth track punctuated with handprints.
“I think we’ve got a big problem,” says Brandon, who’s down the dune with Logan.
“I think you’ve got a big problem,” replies his father, Chad, 30, a lead operator for 3M. Chad is enjoying his spot at the top of the dune.
One of the downsides of the sport is that for every slip-sliding trip down a dune, which takes only a few seconds, there’s a slogging, slippery hike back up. Over a stay of a few hours, that can add up to a lot of strain on the legs.
“This is really fun except when you come back up,” says Rebecca Anderholm, 15, a ninth-grader from College Station, Texas, who is visiting with her Girl Scout troop.
“I think you notice it more as an adult than as a kid, the going-uphill part,” says Duane McVay, 45, associate professor of petroleum engineering at Texas A&M University in College Station, whose wife is the troop leader.
As the morning progresses, the sands are showing the wear. Dunes that are farther from the parking lot are still relatively pristine, but the ones nearby are pockmarked with footprints and gouged with the marks of disks.
There are pits where children have dug holes and finger-shaped trenches where people have taken breaks, stretching out their legs and scooping sand over them.
By early afternoon, the sand is hot and dry, with a texture like flour, and the dozens of people who were on the slopes have largely thinned out.
It’s more difficult to slide when the sand’s like this, the visitor center even has posted a notice that it’s not responsible for sliding conditions after 1 p.m.
Tanner Cash and Craig Shelton, both 13 and visiting with a Boy Scout troop from Lone Oak, Texas, take a break from sliding, instead digging holes two to three feet deep, reaching the layer where the sand is still cool, and burying themselves up to their waists.
“Just having fun,” Tanner says.
Later, at the troop’s campsite, they dig a hole about seven feet deep.
What is it with kids and sand.
“It’s easy to dig in,” Tanner notes.
Finally, sunset approaches. People have almost abandoned the dunes, either leaving the park or following other pursuits at the edge of the sand like flying kites and barbecuing.
Suddenly, the wind picks up, and nature begins to take back its own. The strong wind blows sheets of sand that barely skim the surface, erasing the day’s footprints and filling the holes that people have dug.
Make a new footprint, and within a minute it vanishes. On the leeward side, a thumb-sized beetle emerges and begins walking around, leaving a zipperlike track.
At the peak of one dune, Jovanie Claver of Garland, Texas, and Manny Magsino of Dallas prepare for some nature photography.
Claver, 28, and Magsino, 33, both of whom work for Texas Instruments, spent all day driving hard from Dallas, hoping to get some sunset shots at the park.
“I took the chance to see this place,” Claver says. “I saw it on the Internet, and a friend recommended it to us.”
They hope to get a sunset that will turn the sands red. But the clouds don’t cooperate, keeping the sun partly blocked. Instead, the sands remain light tan, tinged with icy blue highlights as the light fades.
But the sunset itself turns out to be a spectacle of crimson and purple, deeply satisfying to students Drew Virgin, 18, and Jennifer Lee, 17, both of Odessa, Texas, who came out just to see it set, arms around each other.
“It was gorgeous,” Jennifer says. “I loved it. I could do this every day.”
And as the sky darkens, they climb the highest dune to wath the stars, among the last of the day to mark the sands before the dunes return to nature for the night.