Silent Hope

While hiking around sand dunes during the day is among the most exhausting experiences I've encountered, hiking around them at night is much more doable. And because of the location of most of these dunes, they're so far away from the nearest light source that at night the stars are just incredible overhead. Carl Sagan wrote in his book "Cosmos" that there are "more stars in the universe than grains of sand on Earth."  I don't know if that's true, since I haven't counted, but there's a lot of each of them, and honestly looking at mountains of sand like this, it's kinda hard for me to fathom the accuracy of that statement.