Don Barrett (aka DBs travels)'s photos with the keyword: Algodones Dunes

A little grit with your turkey gravy? The wind was fairly high at the overlook parking lot, I’d guess everything was coated in sand (I was, after about 45 minutes of picture taking).

I don’t see others that I know on photo sites mentioning ‘influencers’. I think its an international phenomenon, but we definitely see them often in Southern California. What we see around here is young people, seemingly more women than men, who go out to natural settings and pose in various ways to show off some fashion. Those pictures are then posted on their Instagram (and other) accounts in attempts to draw lots of followers and then get paid for influencing their followers to buy particular brands of clothes or lifestyles. One begins to recognize them because they’re in the setting usually for only just a few minutes with a friend taking photos while they do something that often ignores the consequences of the situation (e.g., running on dunes where there might be dune-buggies racing up the other side).

The closest picture I could get of one of the camping areas….

Dune shadows…

In the distance, the long line of SUV’s camping in the Glamis area northeast of the dunes. The four dune buggies are one of the caravans from the set of buggies in the first of these pictures.

In the distance from here, two large sources of wealth: SUV’s: Just to the right of center, the white structures across the picture (and hidden by the dunes) are SUV’s, some of which are in storage and many of which were occupied. There was no convenient place to stop to get pictures, but there looked to be multiple 100’s of SUV’s – enough to support having mobile taco stands, pizza joints, and bars set up – all with very many maskless visitors. Gold mining: The very large mound on the upper right side of the picture is Equinox Gold’s Mesquite Gold Mine, an active open-pit leach mine that’s been in operation since 1985 and in 2020 is expected to generate 130 to 140,000 oz of gold valued at $975-$1025 per oz. Equinox source: www.equinoxgold.com/operations/operating-mines/mesquite/#overview

If you zoom in a larger version of the picture, you can see that there’s what looks to be a group of men just hanging out on a ridge. Looking up from them, I’m looking southeast down what is more or less the length of the dunes. The dunes are a huge, relatively narrow, strip about 45 miles (72 km) long and 6 (9.7 km) miles wide running northwest-southeast from just across the border in Mexico up through Imperial County of California. Wikipedia has some wonderful pictures of the dunes from space and then of riders at night – links are below. In the space photo, the road we’re on can barely be seen as a thin line across the dunes on the left side of the picture. Night: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algodones_Dunes#/media/File:Glamis_Presidents_263.jpg From space: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algodones_Dunes#/media/File:AlgodonesDunes_ISS011-E-11543.jpg

Modified pickup out in the sand, appears to be a Ford. That odd looking large v-shape near the road is just a drainage pipe sticking a long way out, and the shadow from it.

A very close friend and I wanted to get away from Palm Springs on Thanksgiving, but needed to find a place where we felt safe from infection risk. I had suggested the Salton Sea since that area is never busy, but then we decided to stretch it another 60 miles and go to Algodones Dunes (more on the Dunes later). I knew the Dunes would be busy with dune-buggy folk, but also knew that they would ignore two people who clearly weren’t into their culture – and it’s a very wide open and windy area. So, low risk in terms of contagion, but I was a little concerned since dune-buggy culture seems to equate with the political right. Surprisingly, other than lots of American flags, we saw little overt political expression. Almost all of these photos are taken from a lookout park just off CA-78 which is the highest, easily accessible, point in the dunes. There were a surprising number of campers in the parking lot at the top, and it looked as if many of them belonged to clubs that regularly met. I didn’t ask what this formation was about, but this group later went off in more-or-less a caravan of following each other across the dunes (later pictures).

A close up of the group in the previous photo. A couple of points here re politics and dune-buggy culure…. Politics: The only expressions of politics (other than lots of American flags) we saw while exploring the dunes were some people flying the ‘Thin Blue Line’ American Flag (see the second buggy from the right in this photo.) The flag itself started out in 2014 as an expression of support for policing during periods when we were having large demonstrations against race-biased policing. Being from a social group with a long history of police harassment (gays), I get worried when there are demonstrations in support of policing – but the flag’s interpretation has gone much further than just support for policing. With the increase in social divisiveness that the Trump administration has multiplied, the flag has come to be also interpreted as a symbol of white supremacy, racism, homophobia – crazed nationalism in general. So, when you see one, you don’t know if it is ‘just’ support for police, or for much more. (BTW, the flag on the far left is Arizona’s state flag.) Dune-buggy wealth: When I was a teen in Florida in the 1960’s, people built dune-buggies out of old cars that had been junked and it was a hobby of people who had mechanical skills but little money (i.e., my brothers). The modern dune-buggy culture still seems to be ‘blue collar’ in expression, but I wonder about the money. The buggies themselves seem to be in the $12K-$20K (and more) range and then people are out here for a long weekend in large RV’s that cost $60K or so, and they have expensive enclosed trailers to haul their buggies. So, it’s not a poor man’s sport.