Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve

Updated: Sep 30, 2020

Lucky #13 brought us to Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve in beautiful Colorado.

And, as luck would have it, this park turned out to be one of our top 5 on the #fun scale! Colorado National Parks once again had us star struck with their incredible beauty. Featuring the 14,000 foot peaks of the Rocky's Sangre de Cristo mountains as the backdrop and 30 square miles of the tallest sand dunes in North America as the main event, Great Sand Dunes National Park is a sight to behold.

Recently scientists have discovered that the sand dune formations started over 400,000 years ago.

Although this park was designated a National monument by President Herbert Hoover in 1932, it wasn't until 2004 that it was upgraded to a National Park and Preserve. Just the idea of this park had us intrigued as we knew it would be completely different from all the other parks we had already been to. However, we had no idea how blown away we'd actually be.

We're big on practicing #ResponsibleRecreating, so after becoming accustomed to staying on the designated paths in order to protect the parks, we were ecstatic to hear from the park ranger at the entrance the most exciting news of all time...

There are no designated paths here.

That's right, the park is your playground where you're free to roam about as you please. #Amazing! We were visiting the biggest sandbox in North America and every single grain of sand was at our fingertips to sift through, climb up, slide down, and explore without limitations.

Total Freedom, Woo Hoo!!!

In the off-season, the visitor center does not have any sleds or sand-board rentals available and the closest city proving rentals was over half an hour away. We knew this ahead of time and although we figured it would be super cool to to have these toys, we decided to skip the expense. Instead, we created our own version from items we had with us.

We found a large laminated box we no longer needed that we decided to rip up and make into sleds. While it didn't work the best, the laminated surface was just enough to provide an ample amount of entertainment.

We watched a group of visitors that had what appeared to be sand-boards. They were struggling just as much as, if not more than, we were with our home-made product, which made us thankful we hadn't spent money on a rental. In the future, however, we would definitely research ahead of time the best sleds to use on the sand dunes. Coming from life-long Wisconsinites - sledding on the sand is waaay more fun than sledding on the snow.

When we had our fill of sledding, we wandered over to where the Medano Creek was supposed to be.

We read about the creek in the park literature and knew we were out of season for this too, but naturally had to check out the area before leaving. To our surprise, the water melt from the mountains was trickling down steadily and slowly filling the creek area with icy cold water. We tend to be drawn to the water, so we ended up spending the remainder of our afternoon playing in the water and sand, manipulating the direction of the water flow and enjoying the warmth of the sun.

A simple morning of free-form exploration turned into a full day of skipping lunch and playing until dinner because we were having so much fun that we didn't want to leave. We didn't even notice that we were hungry (a huge feat for one of our children in particular). If we make it back to this part of the world again, you can guarantee that we will be re-visiting this amazing park.