St. Anthony Dunes

The St. Anthony Dunes are about eleven miles from the town of St. Anthony in eastern Idaho. Golden-white quartz sand covers an old basalt lava field in a strip about a mile wide and thirty miles long. The dunes range in height from ten feet to over 400 feet, but they never look the same. The wind that blew the sand to this place continues to rearrange it.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Works Project Administration created the Federal Writers Project to employ out-of-work writers. Idaho published a guide to the state's attractions, so the task of one of writers was to put the scene at St. Anthony Dunes into words...

[The dunes] flow over the landscape like a great arrested tide with most of them unbelievably perfect in their symmetry and contour. They are a beautiful picture at any time of day, and even under a cloudy sky; but their soft and shimmering loveliness is to be seen most impressively under a gorgeous sunset, when the flame of the sky falls to the burning gold of the dunes, and the whole earth here rolls away in soft mists of fire. Under the first light of morning they awaken from an unfolded landscape of shadow and gloom to faintly luminous witchery and then steadily into dazzling piles of light and dark. And from year to year and mile to mile they shift uncertainly under the sculpturing winds, and are never twice the same.

Today the dunes continue to shift, moving about eight feet a year toward the east. Geologists now know that the wind blew the sand to this place many thousands of years ago when Idaho's ancient Mud Lake, about forty miles to the west, began to dry up. As water receded from the shoreline, the wind picked up the exposed sand and carried it off.

The dunes offer wintering range to deer and elk, but also attract human hikers and users of all-terrain vehicles. Students from Ricks College in Rexburg, Idaho, are sometimes seen around bonfires in the sand. Most human visitors would probably agree that a gorgeous sunset still sets off the "soft and shimmering loveliness" of the dunes.

Source:
"Idaho, A Guide in Word and Picture." Oxford University Press: New York, 1937, revised 1950.