Our guide picked us up at 8:00 a.m. with plans to visit a nearby Maasai village, the Oldupai (yes it's Oldupai not Olduvai) Gorge, the Shifting Sands and then to travel down into the Crater. It was a long and bumpy drive on a dirt road. I will leave for Jim to talk about the gorge and anthropological importance. But, after driving down into the gorge we proceeded to drive another half hour or so to see the Shifting Sands. I wasn't feeling too excited about this extra distance because I'd never heard of this phenomenon and thought it a lot of trouble to see sand dunes. Rather than sand dunes this is a single mound of fine volcanic ash, shaped like a large crescent, that travels across the floor of the gorge. The particals are magnetized and therefore stick together. The winds are strong enough to move the sands, with them blowing up and over the mound, but not strong enough to break the magnetic forces. The mound maintains it's crescent shape and reports vary on the speed it travels. What I've read ranges from 16 ft. to 17 meters per year. My guess is it's around 100' long by 20' high. It was very cool. I wish we'd attempted to throw it because upon researching the topic after our return we see it travels back to the mound like a boomerang.
Who knew?