The iconic landscapes of Wadi Rum in Jordan and southern Africa’s Namib Desert have long been celebrated as the visual inspiration behind the fictional world of Arrakis in Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi epic, Dune. However, the true origins of Herbert’s imagination lie closer to home, along the misty shores of the Oregon Coast.
With its rocky headlands, misty forests, and endless rain, much of the state resembles the lush oceanic world of Caladan, the ancestral home of House Atreides, rather than the stark sandscapes of Arrakis. But along the central coast, a different world awaits.
Stretching roughly 40 miles between the towns of Florence and North Bend, 7,000 acres of sand dunes run along the Pacific Coast. Protected as part of the 31,500-acre Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area, these 500-foot-high behemoths have been shaped over centuries by water and 100-mile-per-hour winds, resulting in North America’s largest expanse of temperate coastal dunes.
However, these natural wonders are disappearing. Experts estimate that they could vanish entirely within the next 50 years. Here’s how to visit the site, responsibly, and what is being done to protect them for future generations.
Science, not fiction
As Europeans began to settle along the central Oregon coast during the 1700s and 1800s, they faced a significant challenge: the natural movement of the dunes. The sand swallowed roads, highways, and houses.
The John Dellenback Trail in the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area offers visitors the opportunity to see the natural processes of sand movement.
Photograph by PHIL SCHERMEISTER, Nat Geo Image Collection
“[Settlers] didn’t look at the dunes as valuable,” says dunes expert Dina Pavlis, author of Secrets of the Oregon Dunes. “They were considered a wasteland and a problem.”
In the early 1900s, the U.S. Forest Service started planting invasive species like willow trees and European beachgrass around the dunes to prevent them from moving. The beachgrass was a runaway success, with its deep-growing rhizome stems stabilizing and anchoring the dunes. In the wake of the 1930s Dust Bowl, the U.S. Soil Conservation Service, a branch of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, stepped in to continue with the dune stabilization and terraforming plan.
(Are dust storms getting worse? Here’s why they’re so destructive.)
It was another few decades into this work when journalist Frank Herbert got wind of this dune manipulation project and decided to investigate. In 1953, Herbert went to the town of Florence, Oregon, near the northern end of the dunes, to research and write an article about the USDA project. While the planned article, “They Stopped the Moving Sands,” was never published, the experience profoundly impacted Herbert.
“I got fascinated by sand dunes,” Herbert said in a 1969 interview. “Sand dunes are like waves in a large body of water…and the people treating them as fluid learn to control them.”
This—as well as memories of industrial pollution in his hometown of Tacoma, Washington, at the now-restored Dune Peninsula at Point Defiance Park, built over an old copper-and-lead smelter—are reflected in the worldbuilding, themes, and plotlines of his magnum opus.
From subduing to saving
Today, however, a better understanding of ecology has revealed the flaws behind the plan to control the Oregon’s dunes. They are losing roughly five feet of open sand each year and are being taken over by invasive species that threaten native flora and fauna.
The Oregon Dunes Restoration Collaborative—comprised of different local stakeholders, including the Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians on whose ancestral lands the dunes sit—is spearheading efforts to restore the dunes. Their three-part plan aims to protect existing healthy areas and restore natural processes across the region.
Still, visitors can glimpse areas with natural dunes, such as the one surrounding the John Dellenback Trail.
“There still are incredible areas where you can just go out there and feel like you’re walking on a different planet,” Pavlis says.
Dune stabilization efforts around Florence began in the early 20th century, first with willow trees to act as a windbreak, before progressing to beachgrass.
Photograph by PHIL SCHERMEISTER, Nat Geo Image Collection
How to visit the Oregon’s dunes
Fortunately, Dune fans don’t need a spaceship to visit the original Arrakis. Open for day use and camping, the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area offers hiking trails, ATV and OHV terrain, sandboarding, wildlife viewing, and other outdoor recreation. Instead of sandworms, rare coastal martens, snowy plovers, and hundreds of other species that call the sandhills home.
Explore the South Jetty and Goosepasture areas—two places Herbert visited—or read some of the author’s research books, photographs, and Dune memorabilia in the Dune Room at Florence’s Siuslaw Public Library.
(The perks—and pitfalls—of letting TV and films inspire your trip.)
Despite Dune’s success, the area doesn’t receive many tourists. But Pavlis says that’s seeming to change, especially with the release of the new film, Dune: Part Two. She says she is hopeful that more people coming to the area to walk on the same dunes that inspired Herbert will also help bring awareness to the plight of the dunes and actions to save them.
“Someone has to tell this story,” she says.
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