Today was a short little jaunt into Colorado to see another Fort (home of Kit Carson for 18 months, and 100-200 or Buffalo soldiers over the time it was an active fort (1858-1883). The Fort itself was kind of a bust and what you found online was way more descriptive than what you saw in person. But it was important in its day and along with Fort Union further south, played a significant role during the civil war. Next door to it was a (another) dispensary, so times have indeed changed.
Going north into CO from NM included a change in the terrain to accompany the change in elevation, and once over the border, it no longer was NM-esque.
Bumps started to emerge from the landscape and soon those coalesced into a range. And of all things, the folks who took the above pic drove all the way from Gettysburg which is 1.5 hours away from me. They were headed to the same park.
I originally poo-poo’d the idea of ‘the highest sand dunes in the America’ and thought it was clever marketing due to the overall elevation of the southern Rockies (the park itself was at 7,900 feet). As you approached the park, you saw a pile of sand at the base of some mountains and as you got the scale of things in focus, you could see that these were truly tall. The tallest dune is 750 feet.
This is a niche park with one road in and out. You could go to the visitor center, go to the dunes, or a campground. Oh, there was also a waterfall.
The dune parking lot was almost a typical beach arrangement with a small embankment of trees that separated the parking lot from the “beach” except in this case the beach was hundreds of feet tall.
You started to smell a rat driving down to the dune parking lot as is shown in the first pic. The middle pic actually is at the dune parking lot. “Look Ma! No ocean!!!”. The pic on the right is the slight descent down from the parking lot into the dune field.
The walk from the parking lot flatish sand that had people walking into the distance like some crazed bedouins going on a walkabout. There were folks with walking sticks, folks with very happy dogs, and as you got closer to the tall dunes, there were folks with snowboards because…why not?
The Big World 