Tul,
Even though I suspect you still have no idea that you sort of guessed where I am, I think it's fair to give it to you since, yes, I'm in the Desert of Maine.
I was driving from Quebec across Northern Maine, mostly on private logging roads, and then headed south along the coast. From a high vantage point overlooking the river valley, I remember seeing the Kennebeck River covered in floating logs for many miles as far as I could see...this was years ago when logging on the river was still going on. As I went further south, I saw a sign for "Desert of Maine" so I had to go see. It pretty much looked like a large sandbox in the woods. But here's the official story:
Desert of Maine - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Desert of Maine is a 40-acre (160,000 m2) tract of exposed glacial silt (a sand-like substance, but not actually sand) in pine forest near Freeport, Maine.
It originated when the Tuttle family farmed the site from 1797. Failure to rotate crops, combined with land clearance and overgrazing, led to soil erosion, exposing a dune of sand-like glacial silt. The initial exposed small patch of sand gradually spread and overtook the entire farm. The Tuttles abandoned the land in the 1919s when it was purchased for $300 by Henry Goldrup, who converted it to a tourist attraction in 1925.
The site is preserved as a natural curiosity, hosting a gift shop and a farming and sand museum.
