Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve

  We arrived at the Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve in south central Colorado, a huge sand box that is 36 square miles in size and contains North America's largest sand dunes, some as high as 750 feet above the valley floor. The elevation range within the park is 7515 feet on the floor of the valley and 13,604 up high in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains (translation: Blood of Christ.)

Archaeologists have identified Clovis and Folsom spearhead points used by Stone Age hunters in quest of herds of mammoths and prehistoric bison in the valley. Utes, Navajo, and Apache were here 400 years ago when Spanish arrived. The Natives called the area "the land that moves back and forth" and "land that goes up and down." The first written accounts for the area appear in the 1807 journals of US Army Lt. Zebulon Pike.

The park is home to at least seven endemic species of insects found nowhere else in the world. Elk, pronghorn, and mule deer live here, along with predators like black bears and mountain lions. Beavers, marmots, pike, and bighorn sheep also live here.




The next two photos are from the park brochure and show the dunes with the mountains in the background...

..and depict how the sand dunes were created here by wind sweeping across the San Luis Valley until stopped by the tall mountains.

If you look closely, you can spot people at the very top of the dunes and also people nearing the top. Hikers study the dunes from the bottom and try to choose the easiest route to the top -- sometimes they choose correctly and sometimes they end up hiking a lot farther than they had hoped if they choose a route that dead-ends or doesn't connect to the next slope they had hoped to reach.

The view from the top is spectacular and well worth the effort, but make sure you keep your eyes on the skies because the weather can change quickly, and being on the dunes is not the best idea during a thunderstorm! The dunes area is over 15 square miles in size, and yes, you can hike and even backpack through the dunes if you wish, but don't expect to locate any water sources.

The park began as a national monument in 1932 and after several additions were added, became a national park in 2004.  The national park contains 44,246 acres and the preserve protects another 41,686 acres.

I've been here seven times, the first few times just to climb the dunes as we passed by on Colorado trips, and five times we've used their campground as a place to acclimate to altitude before heading into backpacks in the Uncompahgre/Big Blue Wilderness and the Weminche Wilderness Areas.




The first day, we would stroll around the somewhat level areas of the park to get acclimated to the 8000 foot elevation (after coming from the Chicago area which has an elevation of 800 feet.)  The next day, we'd hike the trail up to Mosca Pass, elevation 9737. 

We also drive back out the entrance road to Zapata Falls. A gravel road takes you up quite a way, where you then park, hike a trail, then hike in the creek and climb the dam as seen below...

...and then work your way into a cave-like grotto and behold the falls, which come down one direction and make a right turn, hence two photos are needed to show it in its entirety...

Yes, the water is refreshingly cold!

A bird watching hike with a ranger led us to this aspen tree sporting evidence of a juvenile black bear climbing it in the past (note the 4 claw marks just above the missing limb.)




Each night we had visitors to our campsite. These visitors are welcome but... 




... black bears are not. I've camped here four previous times, and due to black bear activity, each site now has a large metal bear box for food storage, and our fourth and final morning here this year, there was word of a bear at some other campsite.



In 1807, the namesake of Pikes Peak, Lt. Zebulon Pike, was the first white man to record his impression of the dunes -- "appearing exactly as a sea in a storm, except as to color."