Algodones Dunes / pandemic Thanksgiving 2020 (# 0597)

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).