Today, I went to Great Sand Dunes National Park. What a fun wonderland, right there in the middle of Colorado. I was not sure what to expect, but I saw it on the map when I was planning my route and thought I had to make sure to go. I mean it's a National Park dedicated to sand dunes - what more does a person need to be enticed?Driving up, you see more of the surrounding landscape than the dunes themselves. Soon enough you see the dunes; little ant hills compared with the Sangre de Cristo Mountains behind them. It's a rather odd place to have these dunes. It almost looks like someone dropped a bunch of sand from a plane. On one side, a mountain range; on the other - flat fields.
From the parking lot, the people already on the sand dunes looked like little specks. As I approached and climbed the dunes, I realized many of the people themselves were there to sled on the dunes. They had carried boards up, I had seen online there were places nearby you could rent them. I do wonder if regular snow sleds would work or even cardboard? Though it looked like a lot of fun, I'm not sure how many times I would want to make the climb back up.
The elevation of the GSDNP is already around 8,000 ft so the National Park website warns its hikers that the low levels of oxygen may make the hike harder than expected. I just planned to take my time, as walking on sand is already quite challenging enough. I made a plan to hike to High Dune, the second highest dune in the park (the highest is actually further from the parking lot so it requires you to go up and over the first peaks). I realized, while on the dunes, it is actually quite hard to tell which are the highest ones. I ascended what I thought was the tallest one in view only to find I probably wasn't on it as they all looked about the same height.
Good news though: it's a sand dune. Would it really be a different experience on a different one?
Comments