Great Sand Dunes

We are camping at Great Sand Dunes with six other families. The boys have kids to play with and we have friends to visit with swap recipes.

The dunes are incredible. For a couple of weeks each spring the water melting on the nearby mountains come to the surface of the sand and make streams that move side to side. The streams are shallow, but along the edges the water cuts out deep pits that make super cold swimming holes. The boys spend hours jumping into the water from the sides of the dunes.

The dunes heat up quickly in the day, but the breeze above the hot sand can be cool. People sit around with beach equipment: chairs, balls, hats, and suncreen. We wear white socks to climb the giant dunes, and even then there are hot pockets that keep you from slowing down. But at the top of a tall dune the sight is totally worth it. On one side the mountains stand behind the dunes. Behind the dune we climbed is a line of dunes running into the distance. Specks move in the distance; as we focus we realize the specks are other hikers.

When you start climbing the dunes you find different types of sand. Some is firm and grainy, easier to walk across without sinking. Some is powdery and ripples in the wind in wave patterns. Up high we find corse that has a glass like quality, making it appear to be streams of sand.

To get to the Dunes is a 200 miles journey. We took US-285 S from Evergreen through mountain areas, cities, and then into flat land with mountain off in the distance. The last 75 miles or so the land is very flat and the few towns have low building that sell gas and ice. 

The day we drove to the park there was a lot of sand blowing in the air so even during the last leg of our trip west on Ln 6 N we didn’t see the dunes, just mountains in the distance. Five miles out they finally appeared, but seemed small as if dump trucks had been working for years to build a tourist attraction. The magic was in these five miles, the dunes grew, no longer dwarfed by the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Now the question was, where did they come from?

The ranger station has great exhibits about the dunes. It is estimated they are 440,000 years old, started from the bed of large lakes and added to throughout the years by the wind following through three passes in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.