We've moved on. On from Santa Fe, north into the middle of Colorado. We're
in the San Luis valley, a valley surrounded by snow-covered mountains. It
doesn't rain much here, but water flows in from all directions with the
snowmelt. It's an odd thing, a sagebrush desert, with streams and
groundwater available for ranching and agriculture.
We're at the Great Sand Dunes for the weekend, the tallest sand dunes in
North America. The prevailing wind blows from the west, across this wide
flat dry valley at 7,500 feet and picks up grains of sand as it goes along.
When it's time to lift up over the 14,000 foot mountains on the east side of
the valley, the wind loses steam and drops the grains of sand. We get 750
foot tall shifting dunes adjacent to a mountain stream, juniper pinion
forests, and ponderosa pine/aspen hills leading up to the high peaks. The
sand dunes are closed to motor vehicles, but open to every kind of
self-propelled recreation you can think up. You can hike them, climb to the
top, slide to the bottom, backpack and camp in them. You can't ride
bicycles in them; that would be too tough, but you can take sand boards up
on them and slide down. There is a four-wheel drive road around the
perimeter of them, and that has some sand on it to play in with the jeep.
There is a campground, but it is designed for tent campers and smaller
motorhomes, so we stayed a couple miles away at a private park.
Lots of birds. We saw pygmy nuthatches crawling all through the tufts of
ponderosa pine needles. Wouldn't want to be a pygmy nuthatch with hay
fever, covered with yellow pine pollen.
