We left Durango today to head to the Great Sand Dunes.
As mentioned in a previous post, the Great Sand Dunes has been on my bucket list since flying over it in 1998. Considering that we live mere hours from it now, I was very excited to go there for my birthday. It was really amazing and each of us enjoyed seeing such a work of God nestled in the Sangre de Cristo mountains.
Here we are miles – and I mean MILES – away from the Sand Dunes, and yet you can see them. When I first saw them, I though, is that the Sand Dunes or is that a mirage? But, it really was the Dunes.
It was pretty neat to suddenly have our eyes assaulted by the desert in the middle of the mountains. It was a little hard to comprehend at times.
Proof that there are mountains nearby.
Normally there is a river/stream that runs in front of the Sand Dunes and you’re able to walk through it / play in it, but it was late in the summer and we’ve had a dry summer at that, so the entire river/stream was dried up.
In this next picture, you can see the paths that people take/make to climb the highest dunes. I’ll say this much – I don’t think I’ll ever make that trek. Walking across hot sand with a cloudless sky at high altitude…? Difficult for me to envision making it all that way. You can see people congregated on the first dune in the front – that is where we walked to and took a load of pictures.
In this next picture, you can see the paths that people take/make to climb the highest dunes. I’ll say this much – I don’t think I’ll ever make that trek. Walking across hot sand with a cloudless sky at high altitude…? Difficult for me to envision making it all that way. You can see people congregated on the first dune in the front – that is where we walked to and took a load of pictures.
Here Adam is standing on the side of that “small” dune. We could understand quickly why we saw families were dragging sleds out – the sides of the dunes were very slippery to stand / be on and we had to keep the girls off of them as you would find yourself quickly sinking in the sand and sliding down the side of the dune.
The girls really burned some energy on the dunes – the would run way ahead of us and watching them tired me out – simply because walking across the sand was hard at times – and here they were, running like wild!
When we went to Canada five years ago, we saw large versions of these – cairns – and it was neat to see small cairns throughout the riverbed.
The Sangre de Cristo mountains.
All in all this was probably one of the neatest things I’ve done for my birthday in the last few years… so glad we were able to do this!
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