"WAIT a minute, that's not DUST!?!"  Maybe not, but that is my opinion.  Interested, read on:  I have a conjecture.  If not, sorry, click home and read some nice quotes.

	I see pictures of Mars, and they are full of dust.
	I see Mars rocks, and they are blasted by dust.
	I see Mars rocks blasted right out of the ground, and rolled along...by dust!

"OK, what is this nut babbling about?"

Actually, while I can be very strange, I am not a nut.  Here are some of the things that contribute to my thoughts on the dust conjecture:

	Way back when I was a kid, I was poking up the fire, and chanced to stir the ashes.  They flowed like water.  In fact, I thought something had melted in the fire place.  But, no, when I scooped the hot ashes into the ash bucket, they were just that, ashes.  No more, no less.  But when they were the right temperature, the air mixed in with them made them flow SO smoothly, it was truly beautiful.
	The worlds are old.  Really old.  On earth, debris gets piled up, packed down, buried, and welded back into rock...over and over.  This is partly due to water, but it can also happen in air alone.  I have seen deep rocks that were created when the sand dunes in what is now SW USA (Arizona comes to mind, forgive me if I am wrong).  No water required...but here were these beautiful sedimentary rocks.  Cool.
	An author wrote about cold winds blowing accross the tundra, rumbling like thunder as they tossed dust, sand, gravel, and BOULDERS along the slopes.
	Freeze/thaw breaks rocks.  Even mountain-size rocks.  And they just keep on breaking, getting smaller and smaller.  Water helps, and Mars has some...just not a lot...it appears.
	A NASA rock-dude pointed out that the pockmarks seen in rover pictures were consistant with sand-storm damage seen on boulders on Earth...and that great wear and damage can be done during a sandstorm in just a few minutes.
	Images from the old Viking lander(s? I don't remember if it was 1 only, or both) showed that the rocks in the field of view MOVED in just the short period the landers survived.  Cool.
	Pyroclastic flows are just air and rocks, in the right conditions.   They flow like a flood, often over many miles, if conditions are right.

"So.  What is this conjecture?"  Nothing complex.  For the last few THOUSAND THOUSAND THOUSAND (a USA billion) YEARS:

	Mars has been making dust grains (of all sizes up to boulders) by freezing and thawing.
	Mars has had an atmosphere blowing around its face.
	Recently at least, and perhaps for a very long time (billions of years, remember), there have been planet-wide dust storms.
	Here is the especially iffy part:  The dust flows along like a heavy fluid in the radically different Martian conditions, easilly moving even large rocks.
	As the dust grains blast along, at a high speed, they do tremendous damage to the other, and larger, dust grains, making more dust.
	As the dust grains blast along, regardless of speed, they etch out large-scale faults in the planetary crust, making interesting valleys, and systems of valleys.

I have listened with amusement (that has often offended my wife) as otherwise wise and knowledgeable people explain that:

	There MUST have been water, there is all that sand!  Everyone knows you have to have water to make sand!
	There must have been water, there are all those river valleys!
	There must have absolutely, positively, been water, there are all those flood-plains!

Sorry, friends.  I just don't see it:

	I see dust...from broken rocks and freeze-thaw action...from damage done by airborne rocks/dust.  Some of it may be sand-sized grains...don't know.
	I see faults that have been scoured out by dust.  Some are quite large.
	I see flood-plains where the winds dropped their loads of debris, maybe over many, many, many years.

Here is the fun part:  If it turns out I am wrong, too bad...I am just a computer dweeb who likes to read the science weeklies and laugh at the blindness and the brilliance.