Great Sand Dunes National Park

We went camping Memorial Day weekend - yes, a month ago - to the Great Sand Dunes National Park. I'm a bit behind with things - hey, I've got pool time to get in these days! Anyway - wow - this place is so incredibly cool. It was about a 4-hour drive from our house, down south, to a part of the state we had never been to. It's in the middle-of-nowhere in the San Luis Valley, next to the Sangre de Cristo mountains.
That's the "Sangres" in the background - and see that all that brown in front? That's the dunes. It's some phenomenon that's occured based on it's location -the wind coming from the mountain range on the other side of the San Luis Valley gets trapped at the base of the Sangres - and here are the dunes. They are HUGE - tall and wide. This (above) is the view from our campground.

And it is WINDY at the dunes - as you climb them the wind whips the sand on your legs, as one woman near us called it, "it's like a bad spa treatment." With CC being so low to the ground, she didn't care for the tall dunes as much. But...




For a couple months of the year, the Medano Creek flows through the base of the dunes. It's incredibly wide - a football field - and maxes out at about 6 inches deep. Perfect for wet sand play, dig, etc.




The dunes....



We stayed for 3 nights, the longest we've ever tent-camped. Also - first time ever camping without a pack-n-play! You should have seen those kids feet by the time we got home...ugh.
We explored nearby Fort Garland for Memorial Day - a fort run by Kit Carson to negotiate with the Ute tribe and protect settlers. This was the view from the fort!
Love this picture. I have memories of the sand dunes in Cape Cod...vague memories in truth. Did we slide down them? These dunes, this time of year, did not really support sleds etc for sliding down...something about the moisture level.

Please forgive the doggie-mom voice in the 1st video...advise to turn volume down. Callie got a good workout!