The Sandstorm

Gray Mountain, Arizona

I was recently reading Coronado’s Children (The Southwest Press, 1930), J. Frank Dobie’s wonderful account of the lost mines and legendary treasures of the American Southwest, when I came across his classic description of a Mojave Desert sandstorm:

Nothing in nature is more maddening than a summer sandstorm. The thermometer mounts to 110, 120, even more degrees in the blazing sun. Then the wind rises and begins shifting the dunes. It moves them fifty feet, five hundred feet. Above the swirling, cutting sand the sun becomes a dim copper disc; then there is no sun. The peaks of arid mountains, generally so clearly defined in the distance, blur out. A man caught in the storm cannot see his own hand. At one place the wind scoops out sand until “bottom” is reached; at another it piles up sand into overwhelming crests. On the grazeable fringes of the desert the sand sometimes plays humorous tricks. It has [been known to] cover up a windmill.

This passage brought to mind the sandstorms I have encountered. While the sandstorms of the Colorado Plateau are nowhere near as devouring as those of the Mojave, they are still awesome phenomena. I once drove through a sandstorm near Thompson Springs, Utah that totally blotted out the road, creating a very dangerous situation. When the headlights of approaching cars become very dim orbs and the highway looks like a contiguous piece of the sand-blasted desert, then you are in deep trouble. It is tempting to pull over and stop, but this action places you in danger of being rammed from behind. The best strategy is to slow down, watch for snatches of revealed pavement, and keep plowing forward.

The most impressive sandstorm I’ve ever witnessed, I observed from a distance. I was hiking one very windy March day on the northern rim of the Uncompahgre Plateau, and I had a clear, unobstructed view of nearly the entire length of the Grand Valley about a thousand feet below. A massive cloud of rust-colored dust came pouring in from the west – billowing and twisting and crawling its way across the valley. It must have been going a good 40 mph as it followed the river and ultimately swallowed the city of Grand Junction in a turbulent, ground-hugging nutmeg-colored cloud.

My most recent encounter with a sandstorm was a few months past. I was driving through Arizona’s Painted Desert between Cameron and Gray Mountain, and the wind really picked up, sending horizontal layers of sand across the highway. Most of the time, those sand streams stayed down around the wheels, but for a good twenty minute stretch, they crept up around the windshield. And while they weren’t heavy enough to cause the road to vanish, they did plunge the world into a vague, gritty indefiniteness, like being in an abrasive fog.

As always, the sandstorm was an experience most strange – almost mystical, but certainly unnerving.