Sources matter
A dune guide that fakes its photographs is not worth reading. Documentary images are licensed and credited. Generated interpretation is labelled as interpretation, every time.
If an image shows a real place, a real person, or a real species, it needs to be a real photograph or it needs to say plainly that it is not. There is no third option and no quiet middle ground where an illustration is allowed to pass as evidence.
The photograph on the history page is a Bureau of Land Management image, in the public domain as a work of the United States federal government, obtained through Wikimedia Commons. It is published at its original size rather than enlarged, which is why it appears as a small inset. An exact endemic subspecies is precisely the thing that should never be illustrated by a reconstruction.
The three historical images on the history page, Lake Lahontan receding, the Sand Springs station in 1860, and the 1976 excavation, are generated interpretation. Each carries a caption saying so. No photograph of the 1860 station is known to exist, which is rather the point of that part of the story.
Named places get documentary photography, official imagery, or clearly identified map context wherever it is available. A picture of some other dune standing in for this one is not acceptable, however good it looks.
An image serves one purposeful role. The same photograph does not get reused across unrelated sections to fill space, and the build fails if a hero image is repeated between pages.
Source, creator, licence, and any modifications are recorded before an image ships. Where an image has been resized or recompressed for the web, the untouched original is kept.
If you hold rights to an image used here, or you can identify something credited wrongly, write to michael@duneguideusa.com and it will be fixed or removed.
Verify before travel. Conditions and regulations can change. Use the responsible agency's current information for final decisions.
Open the official BLM source →