Great Sand Dunes National Park

Southern Colorado near the Great Sand Dunes is quite different from the rocky mountain area the rest of the state is known for.  It offered me something I always look for in my travels but had not found yet on my trip to Colorado – solitude!  The landscape was like a mix between the prairie of the Great Plains and the southwestern desert.  I was quite glad to be at lower elevations because the intense sun in the mountains had started to give me a headache.

The Sand Dunes are unmistakable when you see them.  Nothing else looks like them in all of North America.  They look like small hills in the distance, but are formidable when you start to hike them.  Due to the isolation of the dunes and their ability to absorb light, the stars are supposedly very bright.  So, my brother and I decided to hike the Mosca Pass trail into the Sangre de Cristo wilderness during daytime and start our dunes hike at sundown.

Though we did the Mosca Pass Trail simply to kill the time and as a preview to the main attraction,  I found the hike the most beautiful during my entire trip to Colorado.  Going up and down the valley with the sand dunes in the background was a surreal site.  Additionally, at the lower elevations the landscape was alive with flora of amazing colors.

There was a mild wind and with the grasses blowing and the sun shining it is the most enduring memory of my trip.  The trail was not long, so we finished within 2 hours.  This was just enough time to get dinner just outside the park and go back to start our hike through the dunes.

The hike started off promising.  It was calm and beautiful as the sun fell.  We underestimated, though, the height of the dunes as well as how difficult it was to ascend the steeper sides.  Traversing the dunes required quite a bit of planning as the ascents and descents were so extreme we had to find the ridges of the rises in order to progress further and make it to the top of the highest dune.

As night fell, we realized a huge error we had made.  We could not see anything!  Though the park is known as one of the best places to see the night sky, which we thought would illuminate the dunes enough for us to navigate, it was cloudy that night.  After reaching the highest dune, we realized we could not go down the same way we came up.

So, we had some beers and struggled to find a way down.  Eventually, we had to go through a cactus patch and had our boots properly covered in needles by the time we got back to the campsite.  The wind picked up on the way down and the sand stung as it blew all over.  Still, it was a memorable adventure!