The Great Sand Dunes in southern Colorado sit at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, an immense pile of sand that had been swept towards the mountains from across the San Luis Valley from an ancient enormous lake bed. Some of the dunes are over seven hundred feet tall and in total, the tallest in the country, and the dunes cover about 30 square miles.
Constantly shifting with the wind, the dunes are an alien landscape.
Going up the dunes can be an arduous process, because you slide down as often as you hike up. Even in the winter, it was a hot day, and we found ourselves shedding layers as we climbed.
But going down is where the real fun is. Since there’s nothing to fall on but soft mounds of sand, you can gallop down the slopes with abandon. It feels like jumping on the moon.
Beneath the dunes are dry grasslands, where we were lucky enough to spot a herd of grazing pronghorn. I have always been fascinated with pronghorn, because they seem like an animal that should exist in Africa, rather than the United States, and to some degree, that is sort of true! It is believed that the pronghorn evolved to be the fastest land animal in the United States to escape a prehistoric cheetah, that has since gone extinct. Their closest animal relatives are giraffe.
