Multiple gas free rides on the dunes

For a change of pace,the Lele Kawa crew came to join me in Yuma, rather and meeting up in San Diego.

We pulled out all the toys for this one. We had surf boards, snadboards, mountain boards, power kites and our imaginations.

The surf boards worked better on sliding down the sand than expected, and they made for some good photos. The sand was a bit wet and sticky for the sand board, this made it better for the mountain board. You could make it pretty far down the dunes if weren't too steep because the wet sand was packed pretty well. You did end up finding some loose patches to wipe out in.

 We also had fun just trying to jump down the steeper dunes as far as we could. The picture doesn't really due it justice, but it was lots of fun.

-James

Lele Kawa

Imperial Sand dunes, CA

The family joined me in town for the Xmass holiday. Rather than spend the whole weekend in Yuma, we headed for the left coast.

On the way to the left coast we made an early Christmas morning stop at the Imperial dunes. This was my first stop there that I actually left my car. As soon as I parked I just ran up the nearest dune. The dunes weren't like the ones I played on in Saudi Arabia. These dunes had much deeper bowls

Other than the sand sprints all I did was take the pictures below.

Pretty epic photo if I do say so myself

Desert ATV

Yet another thing I have been wanting to do since I arrived out here, but up until recently didn't have the opportunity, 4 wheeling. A large group of of all decided to go one Thursday morning, but as is expected here when the time to leave rolled around, about half the group dropped out.

The 8 of us headed out at about 10am out to the sand dunes, where there were a line of tents with guys renting ATVs. After a bit of haggling (their set price is 300 SAR/hour), we jumped on some 400 cc ATVs, got a quick lesson and heading out into the desert. Only 3 of the 8 of us had ever ridden ATVs before, so we started out slow as the rest of the group was regularly stalling and getting stuck in the sand. By the second hour everyone was pretty comfortable and we were able to cover some real ground.

We all tried to stay together, which was hard. If you traveled two dunes away from the group you got the sense that you were alone. If you went further than this it would often take a few minutes to find anyone else. Most of us had some small wrecks, but luckily nobody was injured.

The coordinates are +25° 4' 42.26", +46° 42' 31.90"