The scar from last year’s Medano Canyon forest fire is hit by a flash flood a couple days before I arrive at the park — the water had no place to go but down, where it raked through the dry washes. When it peaked it simultaneously inundated a quarter-mile of the Medano Pass jeep trail. Further evidence was a strange trail of flotsam — charcoal and black mud — stretching out into the dune field, that and the relatively green vegetation for this time of late summer.