The Great Wander

Once we left Cheyenne, we headed south to the Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve, in the southern portion of Colorado.  I’ve seen sand dunes before, just north of Rock Springs, WY, there’s a batch of sand dunes.  Great Sand Dunes is a bit different though.  To see the mountains, trees, a couple of rivers, and then BAM!  There’s a 30 square mile ‘field?’ of sand dunes that in some cases are upwards of 800’ feet high is mind blowing! I’ve never seen anything quite like it.  The geologic diversity there is stunning. 

We visited there right at the end of the peak season, so we camped about an hour away.   Spring is the most visited time of year because the runoff from the mountains feeds the Medano creek and you can wade, float, and swim in the creek.  It’s really the highlight of the visit if you can get there before the runoff ends.  The creek had really slowed down in terms of the runoff, so we couldn’t swim, it was mostly wading, but you could see where the water had been running even just a week before. 

One thing about visiting the Sand Dunes, you will want some good sneakers.  The sand can get up to 140 degrees Fahrenheit, so you don’t want it sliding into your sandals.  Something I noticed about that too is that the sand would go from cool to scorching in a matter of seconds.  I took my shoes off and walked in the sand when there was cloud cover and it felt like walking on a beach in Florida.  But once the sun hit the sand!  Wow!  It got hot quickly! 

You can hike all throughout the dunes if you would like.  Though there are some trails that have been made to the top of specific sand dunes.  We climbed to the top of one of the dunes and you could see them stretched out for 10 miles.  It was really crazy, looking over that, I thought I was looking at a part of the Sahara from the movies!

Sand Dunes, like most National Parks, isn’t terribly dog friendly.  There are places you can go with the dogs, but it’s limited.  On top of that, with the heat of the sand, I don’t know that I would want to take my dogs out there.  We found a great little doggie daycare, which if you are traveling to national parks with dogs, you’ll find doggie daycare near a lot of the parks.  People want to travel with their furry family and have a safe place to leave them. It was a great little spot for the dogs, and they seemed to have a good day.  One thing about traveling with the dogs too, and doggie daycare is to make sure that you have vaccine records.  Everyone we worked with was more than willing to accept electronic versions, but you do need them.

There’s a lot more to do in Sand Dunes than we did, but we hit the highlight of the park, which is the dunes and we waded in the creek.  But if you have a four-wheel drive vehicle, there’s a lot of the park that you can explore and see a great diversity in the landscape.

There’s also a fair amount of National Forest Land in the area too.  Where we were was the Rio Grande National Forest.   There are some incredible scenic drives, and we also found a couple of nice little hiking trails.  You could tell that the trails and that the area were well used, but we only came across one other group of people, which was great! 

Like I said we were camped for this portion of the trip.  We had a reservation at a National Forest campground, so we knew we had a place to stay, but there are plenty of dispersed campsites in the area too.  Most of this leg of the trip we will be camping, so I will write more about how we do things when we are camping.  It was great though to wake up to birds chirping and fresh mountain air.