Snow sand from Claudette
09/01/09

Mea culpa for being the worst blog author ever. All I can say in my defense is that I've been selling property, and it has been a BUSY summer.
So, I'll now try to catch you up on what has been happening these last few months on the beach on St. George Island.
Well, Claudette popped up on a Sunday afternoon and skipped her way along up our coast to give us some nice rain and high tides. The weather channel people apparently were bored out of their minds, so had a field day reporting how Cladette "slammed" the coastline here. We never even lost power or internet, is all I can tell you.
We did lose a few low-lying turtle nests, but even that loss was much less than in most years - high surf from storms passing by typically take out a good number of nests every year.
What it did give us was a very interesting phenomenon I've not seen before here - it blew the heck out of the sand and deposited it on the non-windward side of the dunes in several places. It was very humid, so I guess the sand was sticky.
That's my simplistic explanation for these rather strange photos at right.
The way this boardwalk looked brought back living in Santa Fe so strongly to me - I've seen many many stair rails and steps covered in just this way by snow, but never by sand.
The boardwalk shown in the photos at right traverses a dune, with steps leading up from the beach (all of which were clear) crosses the top of the dune (top photo) and then goes back down over the backside of the dune and on out to the street where I had left my bike for a check on a turtle nest.
So, what you are looking at is the steps on the *backside* of the dune, away from the beach, and the walkway leading away from the beach.
Cool, don't you think?
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