Kyle has been posting some spectacular images of water and dune fields interacting, and I'm going to skip to the next step: if the sediment source is shut off, and there is enough moisture, plants will colonize them. This leads to dune stabilization. This is Warner Valley, on the west side of Hart Mountain in south central Oregon's basin and range province. The rocks are Steens Mountain basalt, roughly contemporaneous with the Columbia River Basalt. During the Pleistocene, this valley was filled with a pluvial lake. If you look at the bottom middle of the picture, you can see Hart Mountain road snaking up the side of the range. Going uphill, note that where the road makes its first switchback, from roughly E to SW, the ground changes from a fairly smooth apron to ruggedly eroded. You can follow the smoother apron across much of the face of Hart Mountain. This was the Pleistocene shoreline.

After the climate warmed, the lake largely evaporated, leaving loose sediment on the dry bed. The wind did its stuff and blew the dust and sand into dunes. Eventually the trickles coming down from the mountain provided enough moisture for plants to colonize the lumpy landscape. I don't know if studies have been done to clarify the Holocene history of this area, So I don't know if the past climate was drier, or if it was simply a matter of abundant sediment in the immediate aftermath of the lake drying up. The two photos are from Panaromio, one an oblique overview of the valley floor, and the other more clearly illustrating the pluvial shoreline. The Flash Earth site is here.