Mr. Nivose says:
This past June we took a trip to the Sand Dunes national Park:
It's well south of Denver and was quite a time of driving to get there. We drove past SouthPark along the way, and stopped for lunch at an Irish Pub who had a new cook. It took about an hour to get our food. Which is a long time for a Reuben.
Mostly the drive was slow and quiet. Steph drove, I napped sometimes. We listened to a good book. The scenery was pretty enough.
The park is at a higher elevation than Fort Collins, and I am starting to believe that I am prone to elevation sickness, a lot of times when we go for drives into the mountains I end up feeling unwell.
The Dunes don't make up the whole of the park. They are surrounded by hills, mountains and scrub land. The camp ground is just on the edge between the hills scrub and the dunes proper. But on the whole, the Dunes make for a huge area.
To see more pictures of the dunes and our trip Click Here.
To see more pictures of the dunes and our trip Click Here.
In the spring the rain run off and the snow melt make a stream running between the camp sight and the dunes. The water and sand all seem kind of like the beach. The water is kind of chilly. Apparently, the system works that the water carries sediment out of the mountains and also from the dunes, and when it dries on the far side of the dunes the sand is blown back in by the wind. They say this process is constant, and is evolving the dunes themselves.
The first evening I remembered that starting a fire can be a bit of a trick, and I learned that cooking over a fire (but including a grill top) is quite a challenge with out utensils.
It's been a rainy year in Colorado, and it rained a bit on our trip. Which isn't so bad really, because I'm not sure how well I would take to the blistering hot sun and dry sand situation. However, it rained at night which prevented us from seeing the stars (which I suspect are an amazing view from the park, remembering what they were like in unpopulated Northern Minnesota). Also, it was cold. I was cold, clothed in a sleeping bag. I can't remember a time I've been cold in a sleeping bag, and I can't say I slept well.
The next day was on the Dunes themselves. After crossing the creek, which isn't very deep but was quite wide, we had an uphill climb. Most of our adventure was uphill it seems like, even a good portion of returning to the camp ground. Not sure how that works really, Dunes by M.C. Esher I suppose.
It was still cold when we started out. I had on a jacket and pants, proper long pants! Actually, it was quite cool for most of the time that we were out on the dunes. Toward the end, around lunch time I guess, I took off my jacket and rolled up my pant legs. And while I could have done with shorts, I wasn't so hot really. I got myself a bit of a sunburn on my forearms, which is more burn that I have had in 15 - 20 years. Steph got it a lot worse, but she spends a lot of time getting herself burned.
The dunes are a large rolling landscape of, well, hills of sand. Many of them are quite tall, and they're all more or less the same color. Perspective in the pictures is difficult to appreciate.
We brought my grandparent's ancient Bocce set, considering maybe playing out on the dunes. What we did do is roll them down one of steep dunes we were on the side of. At the bottom the "valley" made a bit of a bowl and they each in their turn rolled up and t the right and back down to rest. In some of the pictures you can see them and the trails they left. Though we rolled and threw them with different forces and angles they all stopped in roughly the same area. It was a very neat part of the trip.
On our way back to camp we walked along the stream. It was peculiar mostly because it lacked any aquatic life that I would expect in a steam of that size.
We had ourselves another fire and cooking adventure, and Steph made smores at some point.
The next and last morning we had to deal with a large number of people coming around the sites looking for one that was becoming free. It sounded as though the campground had been full that night and a bunch of people were turned away and so out early looking for sites.
Our drive home was again quite and slow. We stopped at the gator farm, more on that later, and ate at a tasty Mexican restaurant.
On the whole, the trip left me fairly drained, as long car rides will do. I can not possibly explain to you how completely unreal this huge track of giant sand dunes looks sticking out of the green scrub and rolling hills as the park comes into view. That might have been the most important part of the trip, just the unbelievable sites of that.
-Mr. Nivose
Mrs. Nivose says: At the beginning of June we took a short trip to the Sand Dunes. I had been there once before and really liked the place, so I wanted to share it with Peter. The sand dunes are in the San Luis Valley at the south/central part of Colorado. It's a little bit of a drive from Ft. Collins, but since there's just about nothing but mountains to look at on the way, I think it's a pleasant drive. We saw two bighorn sheep hanging out on the side of the road outside Fairplay. We also stopped for lunch in Fairplay at some sort of Irish pub. If we had known it was the cook's second day and the bathrooms weren't working, we'd have gone somewhere else. It was a very long lunch.
Eventually we got back on the road and made it to the dunes. It was a lot more crowded than I expected. We even went in the middle of the week, thinking it wouldn't be too crowded. Luckily we were able to find a campsite. We were just about to set up our tent when it started to rain hard. We sat it out in the car and before long it let up and we set everything up. Peter made a fire and we cooked some dinner over it. It's not easy to cook kababs over a fire without a lot of charring. Everything tasted good though. We were kind of cold and tired by then (it wasn't very warm and it was a little breezy), so we went to bed. The moon was somewhere over half full, so the night was very bright.
The next day we walked out onto the dunes. There's a trail from the campground to the dunes. The neat thing it that once you get to the creek and the dunes there are no trails and you can walk where ever you feel like walking. Medano creek is between the campground and the dunes. There's no bridge. I like to go barefoot and wade through it. The sand is soft and the water is cold at first, but not after a few minutes. The creek makes little waves as sand ridges build up underwater then wash away. I like this creek a lot.
I walked barefoot on the dunes for a good chunk of the day. I think it's more comfortable than getting sand in my shoes, but I did burn my feet pretty badly. The sand felt warm on top then cool below the surface. There are different colors of sand, and some of them are coarse, so I avoided those areas. My feet don't like standing on pointly little pebbles. Most of the sand is sand colored- various shaded of beige- but some is black. I think it has something to do with a high iron content.
We climbed up to the top of the first ridge. I think it was something around a 600 foot climb, meandering along ridges and sometimes straight up the slopes. It's hard work climbing uphill through sand. It's also a little disconcerting walking along a ridge with steep drop off on both sides. But it's wasn't really all that scary because I knew that if I fell over I'd just plop into the sand and stick and not go very far. We walked down some slopes that were acute angle steep, but really had to work at it. We sat on one of these slops and had lunch and threw bocce balls down it to see what would happen. They all ended up in about the same place. Once we got to the top of the first ridge, we found more sand dunes! We slowly meandered back to the campground, taking our time through the creek.
Later that afternoon, Peter found ice cream for us and we went to the Gator Farm (we'll write about that another time).
The Sand Dunes are a neat place. There is so much nothing there, and all the nothing is surrounded by 14,000 foot mountains that don't seem to look that tall. I guess that's because we were already 8000 feet up. I'd like to camp on the dunes someday. I hear it's spectacular when the moon is dark and there's nothing to see at night but the stars.
-Mrs. Nivose
Mrs. Nivose says: At the beginning of June we took a short trip to the Sand Dunes. I had been there once before and really liked the place, so I wanted to share it with Peter. The sand dunes are in the San Luis Valley at the south/central part of Colorado. It's a little bit of a drive from Ft. Collins, but since there's just about nothing but mountains to look at on the way, I think it's a pleasant drive. We saw two bighorn sheep hanging out on the side of the road outside Fairplay. We also stopped for lunch in Fairplay at some sort of Irish pub. If we had known it was the cook's second day and the bathrooms weren't working, we'd have gone somewhere else. It was a very long lunch.
Eventually we got back on the road and made it to the dunes. It was a lot more crowded than I expected. We even went in the middle of the week, thinking it wouldn't be too crowded. Luckily we were able to find a campsite. We were just about to set up our tent when it started to rain hard. We sat it out in the car and before long it let up and we set everything up. Peter made a fire and we cooked some dinner over it. It's not easy to cook kababs over a fire without a lot of charring. Everything tasted good though. We were kind of cold and tired by then (it wasn't very warm and it was a little breezy), so we went to bed. The moon was somewhere over half full, so the night was very bright.
The next day we walked out onto the dunes. There's a trail from the campground to the dunes. The neat thing it that once you get to the creek and the dunes there are no trails and you can walk where ever you feel like walking. Medano creek is between the campground and the dunes. There's no bridge. I like to go barefoot and wade through it. The sand is soft and the water is cold at first, but not after a few minutes. The creek makes little waves as sand ridges build up underwater then wash away. I like this creek a lot.
I walked barefoot on the dunes for a good chunk of the day. I think it's more comfortable than getting sand in my shoes, but I did burn my feet pretty badly. The sand felt warm on top then cool below the surface. There are different colors of sand, and some of them are coarse, so I avoided those areas. My feet don't like standing on pointly little pebbles. Most of the sand is sand colored- various shaded of beige- but some is black. I think it has something to do with a high iron content.
We climbed up to the top of the first ridge. I think it was something around a 600 foot climb, meandering along ridges and sometimes straight up the slopes. It's hard work climbing uphill through sand. It's also a little disconcerting walking along a ridge with steep drop off on both sides. But it's wasn't really all that scary because I knew that if I fell over I'd just plop into the sand and stick and not go very far. We walked down some slopes that were acute angle steep, but really had to work at it. We sat on one of these slops and had lunch and threw bocce balls down it to see what would happen. They all ended up in about the same place. Once we got to the top of the first ridge, we found more sand dunes! We slowly meandered back to the campground, taking our time through the creek.
Later that afternoon, Peter found ice cream for us and we went to the Gator Farm (we'll write about that another time).
The Sand Dunes are a neat place. There is so much nothing there, and all the nothing is surrounded by 14,000 foot mountains that don't seem to look that tall. I guess that's because we were already 8000 feet up. I'd like to camp on the dunes someday. I hear it's spectacular when the moon is dark and there's nothing to see at night but the stars.
-Mrs. Nivose
