The steps are closed, the sand has shifted making them dangerous.

The dune has a volume of about 60,000,000 m³, measuring around 500 m wide from east to west and 2.7 km in length from north to south. Its height is currently 110 metres above sea level. The dune is a famous tourist destination with more than one million visitors per year.
The dune is considered a foredune, meaning a dune that runs parallel to a shoreline, behind the high tide line of a beach.
On 24 January 2009, a peak windspeed of 175 km/h (109 mph) was recorded during a storm at the dune, damaging the dune.