We are leaving the Rocky Mountains for the tallest sand dunes in North America! Our next park is Great Sand Dunes National Park. We are looking forward to sledding down the giant dunes. The park is located in southern Colorado.
After leaving Rocky Mountain National Park we spend two nights in a campground (St. Vrain State Park, which we heavily recommend) near Boulder. We love Boulder, a fun city filled with little shops and tons of restaurants with mountain views out in the distance. From Boulder we have a four-and-a-half-hour drive to Great Sand Dunes. We aren’t quite sure what to expect and as we arrive we see grasslands and the Sangre de Cristo mountains… and then out of nowhere we see an enormous stretch of giant sand dunes stretching out into the distance. It is really an amazing sight.
We pull into the park to find the Pinyon Flats campground. It is a five-minute walk from the dune field. Spectacular. This is a no hook-up campground, including no electric. That means we can’t run our heat even though it will be dipping into the forties at night. Our heat is propane, but the blower for the heater runs on electric. It can run for a little while on battery, but not all night. The blower is a huge battery drain. We know this from experience. In North Cascades we had our battery die… due to the blower. So we pull out the blankets for this stop.
After we settle in, it’s late afternoon and we go over to the Visitor Center, stamp our passports, get hiking advice and get Elle’s junior ranger’s book. The Visitor Center is all windows in the back with a long porch that looks out over the dunes. We sit back there and work on Elle’s junior ranger book and then we hike the short nature loop in front of the dunes. That night we look out at the stars – they are brilliant.
The next day we rent sleds so we can ride down the giant dunes. FUN! But it is really tiring to climb the dunes with the wooden sleds. We are nervous to take the first ride down – it looks so steep! But DT takes the plunge and sleds down. We bury the front of the sled into the sand on a couple runs but most of them we shoot right down the dune. It really is fun in the sun! And tiring. We get so much sand in our shoes we can’t move our toes. We dump mounds of it out when we get back to the parking lot. We go back to the Airstream for lunch and then take a short half mile hike on the Montville Nature Trail. The trail is not on the dunes, it’s in the woods, but it has amazing dune views from the top.
The next day our plan is to hike the challenging High Dune Trail to the top of the dunes, but Kaye is not feeling well, so instead DT and Elle take the shorter Dunes Overlook hike from the campground that leads through some canyons up to a viewpoint in the nearby foothills. Kaye is feeling better by the afternoon, but we opt for a laid-back afternoon in the Airstream. Just before sunset we walk the trail from the campground down to the dunes – it is beautiful with the golden light reflecting on the dunes. Then we go to a ranger program on the night skies. Great Sand Dunes really is a stunning place to see the stars. We look forward to returning, and next time we will hike to the top of the dunes!
