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Article: Oregon's sea of sand: Explore 45 miles of shifting dunes, forests, and wetlands--all teeming with wildlife.(Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area)
- Article from:
- Sunset
- Article date:
- March 1, 2002
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 Sunset Publishing Corp. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Some days the sand is light and dry as sugar, falling away underfoot. After a rain it's like soft-serve ice cream, yielding gently. Then there are winter days when the east wind blows, scouring the sky of clouds and freezing the dunes hard as marble. Always, the dunes are a sculpture, and a work in progress.
It takes a lot of sand, a lot of wind, and a flat coastal plain to create a shoreline dominated by dunes. On Oregon's south-central coast, those elements come together like nowhere else, and the results are stunning. Broad expanses of open sand undulate, sweeping up into steep mountains or falling off into lakes, ponds, and shallow quagmires of quicksand.
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