A continuation of our Great Sand Dunes National Park trip report. More pictures are available (along with captions) on my MySpace photo album.
Friday
We woke late on Friday, because we were going to hit the dunes in the afternoon. Everything we read said to climb the dunes in either the early morning or the evening, to keep away from the worst of the heat.
Our first trip was to Zapata Falls, a thirty-foot high waterfall hidden within a small cave. The hike was a short half mile, and the temperature change once you reach the trees and river outside the falls is drastic. It's like walking into an air conditioned building.
If you actually want to see the falls, you'll have to wade into the water and pass into the small cave. A word of warning: that water is cold! I'm talking "hurt your feet until they're numb" cold. You have to wear shoes, so wear something that can get wet. I wasn't sure whether it was necessary to get into the water to see the falls, so I wore the shoes I was planning to hike in. The waterfall was gushing pretty hard, and the mist filled the cave, so it was difficult to get pictures without risking your electronics.
When we'd had our fill of "looking at water," we headed on over to the park. Our main goal for the day was to hike to the top of High Dune, one of the two main dunes (the other is Star Dune.) The Essential Guide I linked to in my earlier post said to allow two to three hours to go from the parking lot to the top and back.
Where the Medano Creek flows is a great place to take the kids. It's the ultimate sandbox. The children we saw were having a blast building sand castles, forts, and where the water was deep enough and the child small enough, splashing around.
We walked past the creek to the first dry area and sat so my shoes could dry and we could eat a bit. Another thunderstorm was forming, so the weather was nice and cool, but we were worried about getting rained out of our climb.
Once we were ready to go, we decided to time our ascent. We started at 2:23 p.m. One thing I noticed: in the time we were out there, only about a dozen people climbed to High Dune. Out of all the people there, I'm guessing less than a quarter actually attempt to reach the top. And I'll tell you why.
It's hard.
Walking in sand is not easy. Walking in sand uphill is even harder. Plus, you learn one thing really quickly: the sand lies. Do not believe the sand. I'll explain more later.
So anyway, we're walking to the top of High Dune, making good progress. The wind picks up. The sand stings our bare legs. We're breathing hard and our leg muscles are burning. And then we're at the top. For us, from the very base to the top, was fifty-three minutes. That include stopping to catch our breath and take pictures.
It was a nice view, but we were a bit disappointed. We were expecting a little more work than that. We stood at the top for about fifteen minutes, and then we tried to decide what to do next. Go back to the hotel room and bum around?
What if we headed for that dune? Yeah, that one way over there. That's Star Dune, right? Turns out it is.
Star Dune is another popular destination in the dunes. But here's the interesting thing. The entire time we were walking toward it, and the time we were on top of it, we never saw another person who headed out past High Dune.
It was a lot of fun to plan our own route rather than taking an established trail. We would stand on a crest or the top of a dune and discuss our next route, then head that way. It was usually better to avoid a valley, since that just meant having to climb back up again.
The wind at times was fierce. I would recommend against trying to take a small child onto some of the dunes, especially the ones with narrow crests at the top. Those wind gusts could easily cause a small child to lose his balance and fall, and some of those slip-faces (the steeply sloping leeward surface of a sand dune) are hundreds of feet high. During the worst of the sandstorm, the wind picked up the sand and rolled it around, so the appearance was much like ocean waves during a storm.
These pictures just don't do the dunes justice. It's impossible to see just how steep and long many of the dunes we traveled were in a 2D image. At times, the climb was close to vertical, especially at the end. We would travel a few feet, stop to rest, go a bit more, etc. When we saw how steep the final ascent and how narrow the crest we would have to walk along was, we weren't entirely sure we'd even make it.
It took us another two hours from the top of High Dune to the top of Star Dune. We'd been making near-vertical climbs for close to three hours now, and we still had to get out. We decided to choose a low valley that would take us out toward Medano Creek, where we could walk along the flat sand back to the parking lot.
There are a few ways to get down from a dune. You can walk down. When the sand is deep and soft, that's the easiest way. You'll make long, soft strides. When the dune is steeper and the sand a little more packed, you can go down like this:
Coming down is also where we learned the hidden truth: the sand lies. Those low, gentle sloping dunes that looked so easy from the top of Star Dune? They're sheer cliff faces! At least, that's what it seemed like at times. At one point, we stood on a crest and tried to decide between two areas. Area one was closer to the parking lot, but the climbs were higher. Area two had a gentle sloping dune that was a bit further from the lot, but at least the climbs weren't as rough.
Except that wasn't true. As the pictures below show, it was almost vertical.
Stupid lying sand.
When we finally escaped the dunes, we still had the trek back to the parking lot. Five and a half hours after we stood at the bottom of High Dune and decided to start climbing, we finally made it back to our truck: sore, tired, wind-burned, blistered, and sand-blasted.
I can't wait to go again.
A few tips for the dunes: Don't forget your sunscreen, sunglasses, and a hat! Bring plenty of water. Again, even though it wasn't especially hot, we went through about a half gallon each. Make sure your electronic devices have cases you can store them in. That sand kicks up pretty severely, and you don't want to ruin them. Finally, when you're walking a crest, put your feet on either side of the ridge and do a sort of duck waddle across.
As you can see by the number of pictures and the length of this post, we enjoyed the dunes the most. It's not possible to describe how amazing it is to sit on top of Star Dune and look out across the entire dune field. You just have be there.