Westward 2013 – Part 2 (8/12 – Great Sand Dunes National Park)

Today we drove south about 100 miles to see the Great Sand Dunes National Park.  What a beautiful and unusual place to find out here in the mountains.  These are the tallest dunes in North America, rising about 750 feet from the floor of the San Luis Valley on the western base of the Sangre de Cristo Range, covering about 19,000 acres. The dunes were formed from sand and soil deposits of the Rio Grande. Westerly winds picked up sand particles and deposited them on the edge of the valley.

Lots of kids sand-boarding but I don’t have any pictures of them because Vaughan decided he wanted to climb to the top and took the camera with him.  Being smarter than he is, I decided to sit down on the top of a dune and wait.  He made it nearly to the top when the thunder started and he made the wise choice to not be the tallest thing around for lightning to hit.  Besides walking in extremely hot sand up hill is no fun anyway.

While driving out of the park we saw a coyote chasing a fawn and a minute later we saw the doe.  The fawn stopped to look at us (hence the picture) but I yelled at her to run.  She continued to stare – the young are so foolish at times.

By the way, Vaughan has been adding videos to youtube of many of his rides - go to www.youtube.com and search on ga308adv.

Normally all you see is the prairie and then the mountain - who dumped all that sand in between?

 Do you see the small dot near the middle of the picture - that's me.  Vaughan was about half way up when he took this.

 This is where I waited for him - he nearly made it to the top - the dune you see near the top of the picture.

 Run Sweetie, Run!!

The big bad coyote is on your tail!!