Today's adventure took us to Great Sand Dunes National Park (#42). Wow! What a huge pile of sand! To get to the actual dunes, one has to cross Medano Creek, which is an amazing feature itself! During the spring snow melt, which is now, there's a lot of water in the creek. By August, it will be a trickle. As you can see from the pictures, there were LOTS of people there -families with kids out for a "day at the beach". We hiked up to the top of the nearest little dune - enough to see the kids riding their dune boards down the back side. What fun! As you know, walking in soft sand can be a real slog! Some brave and very fit people had climbed all the way to the top! Even though the temperature was only in the high 60s, the sun was strong and sand was quite warm. Can't imagine being here in mid-July.
The coolest thing about Medano Creek was watching the "surge flows". Mesmerizing! I'll try to download a video clip.
After our lunch under the shade of a tree in the parking lot, we left the park and headed north to Pueblo ("Steel city" - huge ugly mothballed steel plants along the way) and on up to Colorado Springs. We're on the east side of the mountains - snow covered peaks to our west, the plains of Kansas to the east.b We'll be two nights at a very old LaQuinta.
Tomorrow Garden of the Gods and Pikes Peak.
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| Spanish Peaks, south of Pueblo |
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| Remembrance of my former life in NY! |
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