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The Mojave desert has a song all its own – if you take the time to listen

June 4, 2025

Some believe the desert is silent.

They picture a vast mute nothing, hot enough to grill a steak on your vehicle’s hood and dry enough to chap your soul. They think of scorched plains, scrubby plants that look like they gave up trying, and a horizon that barely bothers to show up. A place made of absence.

But those people have not spent enough time with the Mojave.

They haven’t heard the wind chip away at rock like a sculptor, or the way a canyon answers itself with a ghostly “who, me?” They haven’t paused long enough to hear the hush between one rattle and the next, the percussive rhythm of something unseen sizing you up.

The desert doesn’t lack voice. It just doesn’t shout. And sometimes, if you’re lucky enough, the desert sings.

***

I like to drive desert highways, those unbending lines of asphalt that stretch toward the horizon like a wire pulled tight. I blast Lucinda Williams and floor it just enough that the drive becomes a kind of release, not from speed, but from gravity. Eventually, the landscape opens up like a question. A strange one. The kind you don’t answer, just follow.

My favorite stretch is when I take the back way from the Coachella Valley to Las Vegas, a road that thrums with solitude. Sometimes it gets so lonesome that I catch myself daydreaming about alien contact, not out of fear but a desire for companionship. My GPS claims the trip takes three hours. It always takes five. Time, like sound out here, doesn’t behave.

It’s along that route, between the skirted palms of Palm Springs and the neon seizure of Vegas, that the land rises and swells, nudging you to notice. To stop. This is the Mojave National Preserve — 1.6 million acres of desert made strange and sacred by lava flows, fossil beds, abandoned mines, creosote, Joshua trees. In the middle of it all rise the Kelso Dunes, 45 square miles of pale sand heaped like a dream misplaced, like some celestial toddler spilled a bucket across a granite floor.

Joshua Trees sit silhouetted against the sky on Thursday, January 6, 2011 east of the of the Mojave National Preserve. (File photo by Stan Lim, The Press Enterprise/SCNG)

***

For years, I passed them without stopping. A decade of drive-bys, of glancing and then continuing on, as if I wasn’t quite ready to be held by that kind of quiet.

Then one December, I pulled off the road. Not out of a plan, but out of ache. I had been feeling unmoored, like a tide cut loose from its moon. A sorrow that doesn’t speak, only settles — slow and inevitable — the way dust collects in a long-closed room. I thought maybe a walk in the desert might tether me back to something real, help me shake off the blues.

I keep a daypack in my trunk for moments like this. That day I threw it over one shoulder, tucked a water bottle inside, and slid in a piece of broken-down cardboard I’d been meaning to recycle, thinking maybe I’d ride it down a dune the way we used to sled hills as kids. I didn’t know yet whether I’d use it. I only knew I needed to climb.

I parked at the trailhead and stepped out of the car. It was like entering a snow globe drained of snow and shaken by heat. Everything was sand. Pale grains gleamed under the low winter sun, their edges rounded from the long alchemy of wind. The light ricocheted in all directions. The air was taut and breathless, like a held note waiting to be struck.

I headed toward the tallest dune — a mound that looked soft and harmless from a distance, like a big pile of sifted cake flour. This, of course, was a lie.

Sand is a trickster. From afar, it promises gentleness. Up close, it devours your ankles. You think you’re hiking, but really you’re drowning upward. For each step forward, the dune takes some of it back. So I climbed, and the dune slipped away beneath me. I climbed more. Still, it yielded.

I realized this is not the kind of terrain where you seek solid footing. The sand will not offer it. Instead, it gives something more valuable: a lesson in how to move when the ground won’t hold you. How to persist without purchase. How to balance atop uncertainty and still keep going.

Halfway up — lungs straining, heart loud in my ears — it struck me that this wasn’t just a climb. It was a mirror. Of now. Of these strange, teetering times. The shifting ground beneath me, the faltering steps, the way each effort slid backward before it counted. It all felt familiar. There’s no firm path, only the insistence to keep moving, even when you can’t see where forward leads.

The summit appeared. I tried to run. My legs buckled. I crawled the final feet, hands sinking into the grit. At the top, I sat and breathed.

Then I remembered the cardboard folded flat in my pack. I pulled it out and perched on it, the way I did with a sled on snowy hills in Ohio. Gave it a little nudge. Nothing.

So I threw myself forward. And that’s when it happened. The dune trembled. A deep vibration rose from the sand, felt first in my hips, my knees, my chest. Then sound. A long, low, resonant hum. Not loud but wide, like a didgeridoo in the underworld. A sound that bypassed the ears and went straight to the bones.

The dune was singing.

I froze. Let the sound ripple through me. The boom continued, low and haunted, the voice of a landscape exhaling.

What I triggered was not magic, though it felt like it. It was geophysics disguised as wonder, a phenomenon known as “booming” or “singing” sand. The sound, deep and unplaceable, comes not from wind or from otherworldly creatures (though Marco Polo in the 13th century described similar noises in the Gobi Desert as “spirits talking”), but from the sand itself in motion.

At Kelso, the ingredients align just right. The grains are remarkably uniform — mostly quartz and feldspar, worn smooth by wind and time. They’ve traveled from the Mojave River sink, carried here by gusts that whip off the Soda Dry Lake bed. Over centuries, they’ve piled into these vast, velvety dunes, rising nearly 700 feet above the basin floor.

The noise is born of a chain reaction: as grains tumble, they jostle their neighbors, compressing pockets of air and setting off synchronized vibrations. It is an avalanche turned orchestra. The frequency of the sound depends on grain size and speed of movement, and its resonance can last several seconds, echoing across the basin like thunder caught underground.

But the symphony is selective. Only a few dunes on Earth possess the right combination of grain chemistry, dryness, steepness and sun-baked cohesion. Kelso is one of just seven in North America known to sing, and one of the most sonorous. Scientists have studied it for decades, chasing the exact mechanics, but even now, the dune will not always cooperate.

It will not sing for the careless, and it doesn’t always boom on command. You must move a certain way: deliberate, sustained, downward. You must press and shift and let go. And you must listen.

There are other sounds in the Mojave, but they’re not the kind we’re trained to hear. Wind tunneling through a canyon. The distant whistle of a hawk riding thermals. The dry clatter of gravel under boots. None of these noises beg for your attention. They wait. Patient. Ancient. Ready only when you are still enough to be changed by them.

We treat the desert like something to survive or speed through: windows sealed, AC cranked, radios loud, eyes on the next stop. But the Mojave doesn’t reward conquest. It asks for humility. For curiosity. For a kind of listening that begins in the soles of your feet.

And when you move like that — when you soften and stay open — the land doesn’t just speak. It sings.

Joshua Tree National Park offers spectacular hikes and vistas in a region where California's Mojave and Colorado Desert ecosystems meet. (Getty Images) — Joshua Tree National Park offers spectacular hikes and vistas in a region where California’s Mojave and Colorado Desert ecosystems meet. (Getty Images)

The Mojave desert has a song all its own – if you take the time to listen Orange County Register

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The Mojave desert has a song all its own – if you take the time to listen

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