New Zealand: mountains of sand

To meld last month’s Monday mountain meme with the moment’s New Zealand retrospective (and Lincoln’s birthday, for that matter), here from February 14, 2017 (which adds Valentine’s Day), are two mountains of sand we saw at the Te Paki dunes way up north near the tip of New Zealand’s North Island. The first of the two photographs, while a more-conventional landscape view, might make you doubt the location and think you’re at an oasis in the Middle East or North Africa. You may also be surprised to hear that a stream runs from right to left between the vegetation and the tall dune. This is New Zealand, after all, a land of lots of rain.

The other picture is a closer and more-abstract view that emphasizes the rippled patterns in the sand elsewhere in the dunes. If you’d like, you can contrast it with the scalloped sand on the level dune that represented Te Paki here last year.

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman