Our second day in Kobuk Valley had us taking a very long hike. We hiked from 10:30 am to 4:00 pm. We hiked about 8.5 miles and over 21,000 steps. Our initial goal was to hike to the highest sand dune in the whole of the Kobuk Sand Dunes. Our guide told us about it and steered us in the right direction. But over the course of the day, we reached the tops of many dunes and slid down a bunch of them as well. It was a great hike with wildly changing weather and incredible skies.

The first photo is near our camp and the highest dune is out of the picture to the right. I have another reason for showing you this photo. If you look at this first photo, it looks like a beautiful morning, which it was. But right after snapping the first photo, I took a couple of steps forward and snapped the second photo. I zoomed in on the top of the dune ridge when I had the dark mountain fully in the background. The first photo gives very little indication of how much the wind was blowing and how much sand the wind was picking up and sending airborne. Our time in the Kobuk Valley sand dunes was great but I generally felt a bit ‘sandy’ while we were there.

You can see in the third photo that we didn’t slide down all the dunes. We hiked up and down dunes all day that day.

We had to cross the Ahnewetut Creek to get to the tallest dune. The creek was not hard to cross. It was mostly just a few inches except for the deepest channel which was about a foot deep. The water was quite cold.

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It was really beautiful with all the fall color along the creek and later in the boreal forest.