Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve

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After miles of the winding canyons and passes of the Gunnison Basin, you enter southern Colorado’s San Luis Valley. It’s vast and flat, a section of Kansas lifted to 8000 feet, ringed in snow-capped peaks. And hidden in the corner are 30 square miles of the tallest sand dunes in North America.

The terrain ranges: a 14,000-foot peak, an alpine lake, a mountain wilderness; a creek, Medano, that hugs the dunes, surging with the waves of constantly shifting bed sands for a few months then flowing secretly beneath the ground for the rest; a field of towering dunes home to species found nowhere else; and an abutting wetland.

I arrived at 2pm, became acquainted, and started walking. The Sand Ramp Trail follows the space between the western dunes and eastern Sangre de Christo mountains. It’s pleasant, easy hiking.¹ I made camp at Escape Dunes, whose thick firs were just high enough to pitch a shelter beneath. As the sun set, the trees’ dense needles kept the air below 10 degrees warmer than the clears. Asleep at 8pm, I woke around 5am, read, watched the sun rise.² After a hot breakfast, I broke camp and left the trail, headed straight for the towering wall of sand.

Following the ridgelines is best. But sometimes the dunetops don’t connect, forcing a steep trip up shifting sand. Each step starts a mini-avalanche, sand spilling down with the soft sound of faraway waves.³ You push and pump your legs, dream of firm footing, pant and grunt, scramble.

And then you’re up, greeted with whipping winds, an alien panorama, and brunch. Walking across miles of barren dunes, shoes filling with grit, you finally take them off. It’s February, and you’re barefoot in warm sand, walking dunetops, running down near-vertical walls.

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1. Well, except for the snow still on the trail. Snow on trails gets packed from foot traffic and lacks the heat sinks that vegetation provide, so it melts more slowly. Hiking early helps: cold night temperatures harden up the snowpack, allowing you to stay (mostly) on top. But I was hiking in the late afternoon, when warm late-winter temperatures had turned the snow to mush. Oh postholing, aren’t you lovely? As soon as I started sinking in to my knees with every step, melting snow soaking my boots and socks, I realized:

   1. I should have worn my gaiters.
   2. Wait… I didn’t bring a dry pair of socks.
   3. This is going to suck.

   And it did. I did the best I could, putting my wet feet in stuff sacks to form a vapor barrier layer, then wet socks for whatever warmth they had left, then my big puffy mitts to both warm my toes and prevent the socks’ evaporating mositure from wetting out the footbox’s down. But it was still cold, especially when putting on those frozen-solid shoes in the chilly morning. Lesson learned. ↩

2. It’s amazing how quickly living with the sun and generally being outside resets your biological clock. I never, ever comfortably go to sleep or wake up at those kinds of times. But whenever I camp (and especially on this trip and along the coast, with the long winter nights), it just happens. And rather than feeling like seperate things, the days melt together. Time becomes more cohesive. ↩

3. Once, standing on the edge of a sharp ridge, I ran my trekking pole back and forth across the top to start a biggish avalanche. It was beautiful, with the shifting lines and moderate whitenoise. Then I began to notice a faint rumbling, which became a completely-new-to-me shaking underfoot. It felt like it came from deep within the dune.

   And when you run quickly down a dune, you learn that sand squeaks, and that what your foot finds after sinking two feet into a slope is a sea of grainy cold. ↩