Colorado’s Great Sand Dunes

That’s right, land locked Colorado has sand dunes. In fact, they are the tallest sand dunes in the U.S.A.

You can find these dunes about 4 hours from Denver, south and west, near the city of Alamosa in the San Luis Valley. That’s where Great Sand Dunes National Park, one of Colorado’s four National Parks lies.

On our recent trip home from Santa Fe, New Mexico, we made a short detour off of US 285 to visit the park. We’d driven by it many times and you can actually see the dunes resting up against the Sangre de Cristo mountains as though a big fan blew all the sand there. And that’s, kinda, what happened.

Hundreds of thousands of years ago, the Sangre de Cristo mountains were “uplifted” while the San Juan’s, to the west, were created by volcanic activity. This formed what is known today as the San Luis Valley. Relatively recently, scientists discovered that there was once a lake (now called Lake Alamosa) which drained away into the Rio Grande. When the lake drained away, the sand left behind was blown up against the Sangre de Cristos where the Mosca, Music and Medano passes form a little pocket where it collected.

While sand doesn’t move across the valley the way it once did, predominant winds from the southwest blow towards the mountains while storm winds blow from across them creating vertical growth in the dunes, making them the tallest in the US. They are majestic, particularly, when juxtaposed against the mountains with golden ranchland to the other side.

While the National Park isn’t exactly on the way to or from many places, if you find yourself in Alamosa, or heading along Highway 285 north or south or along Highway 160 east or west and have a few extra minutes or want to find a nice scenic spot to eat a picnic lunch, as we did, this is a pretty darn good place to do it.