Our first stop on this year's summer road trip was Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado (this was our year to hit all the Colorado parks!).
It's pretty cool to drive towards the park and just watch the sand dunes get bigger and bigger. For perspective, the Sangre de Cristos mountains behind the dunes have 8 peaks over 14,000 feet. The dunes themselves are about 800 feet high.
We parked at the visitor's center, got ourselves oriented (our three must-dos at every park: watch the park film, buy a sticker, and get a Junior Ranger booklet!), and then headed towards the dunefield.
To get to the dunes, you walk across this huge stretch of sandflats. Depending on the time of year, you might see a little trickle of water, a good-sized creek, or enough water that you can actually float down it in an innertube! Medano Creek is seasonal; we arrived about a week before the end of its spring runoff, so there was enough water to get pretty wet (we ended up taking our shoes off to cross).
Well, some of us took our shoes off. Some of us just relied on other people.
Another family walking back offered us their sandsleds (we passed them on an hour later), so we headed up into the dunes to try some sledding just like we'd done at White Sands a few months earlier. And yowch! Just like at White Sands, the wind was craaaaaazy and it felt like being inside a sandblaster. Except this time we were camping for the next week rather than going back to a hotel where we could shower all the sand off.
We'd been hoping to do some serious hiking in the dunes, but it was just so windy that it was pretty painful, so after a couple hours of playing on the dunes, we headed back to our campsite outside the park at Zapata Falls.
It was INSANELY windy here! We were about 1000 feet above the floor of the valley and we watched the visibility gradually decrease as the winds picked up and the air filled with sand. It was so windy that we were really worried about all our tent poles (45 mph steady winds and 80 mph gusts) and I got on recreation.gov to see if we could just go up to Rocky that night. Nothing was open, so we tied a whole bunch of lines to try to support the tent poles (we ended up with one bent pole on 3 tents, pretty good).
It was really hot, so the wind was pretty nice except for the "will it blow the tents away" part.
We were all pretty tired from driving through the night, so we just chilled at the campsite and read and lay in hammocks while we waited for the temperatures to drop down again.
Not a bad way to spend the afternoon!
Then we hiked up to Zapata Falls, which was hot and pretty buggy but very pretty once we got up to the water and the temperature dropped about 20 degrees!
The main falls are around this corner--there was no way to get there without either wading through the knee-deep water or jumping around like crazy. I opted to do neither, but Neil went up (after he'd already fallen in) and said it was really pretty.
Here's the view of the dunefield from the falls.
Then we ate dinner and couldn't make a fire because it was so windy. I really wanted to watch the sunset over the dunes, but we miscalculated the timing because we were so much higher than the valley floor, so when sunset was still a ways off for us it was actually happening down in the valley. Oh well.
I'm still really glad we went back to the park because it was SO pretty seeing the dunes in the twilight. I loved the way the light reflected off the waters of the creek.
Seriously so beautiful!
Then we went back to our campsite and FINALLY GOT TO SEE A DARK SKY PARK!! It was so beautiful (and Abigail knew when Starlink was passing overhead so that was really cool). We left the fly off our tent so we could see the stars. I woke up around 3 am and just lay there for a long time looking at the stars--it was incredible.
Then we made a fun discovery the next morning--the insane winds the day before had kept down the woooooorst clouds of mosquitoes! They were so horrifically bad the next morning while we were breaking camp, totally reminiscent of the Everglades. But I did make these truly incredible breakfast sandwiches with English muffins, fried eggs, sausage patties, and hot honey.
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