Off-roaders were back on the dunes Monday, but it was a smaller ... off-roaders cannot control for everything when racing on sand. “You can try but there’s no 100% guarantee to prevent ...

With temperatures as high as 110° and endless undulating stretches of parched sand, Southern California ... fad — desert drag and dune racing. During the past five years, some 15,000 backyard ...

This story appears in the November 2012 issue of National Geographic magazine. I got my first lesson in the physics of sand dunes in 1998 on an expedition into the Sahara. In order to take aerial ...