As of now, we declare ourselves "here", and the road trip adventures can begin in earnest.
We spent the night in Alamosa, Colorado, a really lovely town in southwest Colorado with great restaurants and a really cute downtown. Alamosa sits between 14,000 foot mountains on a huge plain that is flat because it is a rift valley (a valley created by plates pulling apart rather than dug out by water). At the foot of some of these mountains are sand dunes, which don’t look entirely impressive from a bit of a distance because they are overshadowed by a huge mountain. Once you get closer, though, they are really big, gorgeous, and seem to come from out of nowhere (they have formed over millions of years because wind blows the sand and sediment around the valley until it hits the mountain and settles at its base).
While these sand dunes are one of the more awesome sights I’ve seen, they also damn near killed me. The bottom is at about 8,600 feet, and we decided to climb 600 feet to the top of High Dune, where we would have a view of the entire dune field. Six hundred feet isn’t huge, but it’s not nothing, plus walking through sand is much more difficult than earth, and then there’s my utter inability to function above 7,000 feet. I made it halfway up before things got really bad, though at this point I was falling to my knees every few hundred feet wheezing and gasping for breath. (Brad, meanwhile, was unaffected and just looked down at me collapsed in a heap in the sand with a puzzled look on his face.) I almost gave up a couple times (which is really not something I like to do), but after a lot of gentle coaxing from Brad and rest breaks, we made it to the top, where we got a really spectacular view before heading back down (which was much, much more fun). It was really crazy to walk through, in some places you’d sink almost to your knees in sand. It was also probably physically the most difficult thing I’ve ever done (though, again, no one else on the dunes seemed to find it particularly difficult, and it was listed as “an easy to moderate hike” in the park literature). Despite that, it’s one of my favorite parks because it’s so bizarre to see those beautiful dunes in the middle of nowhere.
Post-death march, we stopped back in Alamosa for Mexican food before heading to Cortez, another beautiful Colorado mountain town with microbreweries, for the night.
Sand angels, post-ascent:
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