By Christian Roewekamp
The dune-buggy tour driver downshifted and zoomed up the hill of sand. Cutting the slope and whipping up fine sand, his tube steel vehicle with roll bar tipped precariously.
He steered against overturning, shifted back into high gear and floored the accelerator. Down the dune he flew at 90km per hour, then immediately attacked another one.
“Keep your mouth shut if you feel like screaming!” a tourist had advised the next customer at the end of her wild ride in the open buggy through Oregon’s dunes. And good advice it was, as the sand will get into almost anything: your hair, your ears, your nostrils.
But the grit no longer matters when the driver, 36-year-old Benjamin Raia, turns off the engine on a dune ridge and you take in the panorama of the broad dunescape. To the west, in the distance, shimmers the Pacific.
“A half-hour roller-coaster ride” promise the buggy tour operators in the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area, which stretches some 50km along the coast of the north-western US state of Oregon, from the town of Florence southward to Coos Bay.
The dunes extend several kilometres inland, and in many spots up to US Route 101, one of the country’s most scenic highways.
Nearly 2,500km long, it snakes along the Pacific coast through the states of California, Oregon, and Washington from Los Angeles in the south to Olympia in the north, passing over the Golden Gate Bridge spanning San Francisco Bay and providing access to California’s redwood forests.
The dunes start south of Florence. Two companies there offer the adrenaline kick of dune rides as well as relaxed tours in open buses. Three areas along the coast are open to all-terrain vehicles.
Many visitors race quad bikes or motorcyles through the sandy expanse, interspersed with “tree islands,” small areas of natural vegetation that are the remnants of at least 5,000-year-old coastal forests swallowed up by the shifting sand.
American Indians once hunted in them, and even today they are home to black bears, deer and coyotes. “In the morning we often see animal tracks in the sand,” Raia said.
The dune buggy tours have been the target of criticism by environmentalists. “But,” Raia noted, “the US Forest Service says they help to hold back the vegetation, which is what all of us here want.”
In the 1930s, European beach grass was introduced to the region to anchor the dunes and prevent sand from inundating river channels and roads. The grass spread quickly, forming a barrier to sand blowing inland from the beach and allowing vegetation to take hold that now threatens to cover the dunes entirely within about a century.
“They’ve burned it, flattened it with bulldozers and fought it with chemicals, but so far nothing has worked,” Raia said.
People wishing to experience the region on foot can do so from Jessie M Honeymann Memorial State Park, which is on Route 101 just south of Florence. The park has a large camp-ground under tall trees, a freshwater lake that is much warmer than the Pacific and ideal for swimming, and access to the dunes.
As the evening sun sinks slowly behind the hills of sand, the roar of a few buggies can still be heard in the distance.
“We’re staying a day longer,” a tourist announces to her husband. They will get back on Route 101 soon enough. — DPA