Great Sand Dunes National Park is a surprisingly spiritual void where time seemed meaningless.Greg Quinion
It is a quiet place, almost startlingly so. A sign at the visitors' centre cited a recent survey that determined Great Sand Dunes National Park to be the "quietest" in the national park system. My wife, Alissa, and I had come thousands of kilometres to experience just this phenomenon. Being used to the rolling green hills of well-watered Connecticut, we wanted to immerse ourselves in the seemingly endless sameness of the sand dunes, the singularity of an unbroken orange landscape stretching to the horizon to meet an endless blue sky.
We were not alone in seeking this. Standing on the banks of Medano Creek, the stream that circumvents the eastern base of the dunes, we glimpsed hundreds of like-minded people clambering up and down the distant dunes in long lines like ants.
During our visit, we encountered day-hikers down from Denver and up from Albuquerque, a French tour group, a South Korean family with their elderly grandfather leading the way. There was even a troupe of obnoxious college students with those plastic vuvuzela horns we thought we'd finally put behind us with the end of the 2010 FIFA World Cup.
The locals, it seemed, had come for Medano Creek. Medano is Spanish for sand dune, and this seasonal creek has no permanent creek bed. The ever shifting sand causes the shallow waters to flow and surge with a tidal action like ocean waves. Families lined its banks like beachgoers at the seashore, the children splashing in the water and building sandcastles. But for us, crossing the creek amid the unpredictable surges proved a challenge. One minute we stood amid a trickle of water, the next our boots were immersed ankle deep in a rush that soaked our socks through.
It was a strange experience to emerge from flowing water into a sea of sand, but not 15 minutes after crossing the noisy, crowded creek we found ourselves hiking in silence, with not a person in sight, and nothing but the sound of the wind and the trickling of sand in our ears. Striding across the barren landscape, we could be easily forgiven for thinking ourselves the only occupants of an alien planet.
To walk the dune field is to see geology at its most fluid, living state. The dunes we walked that day were not the dunes that existed the night before, and the footsteps we left behind would linger scarcely longer than the clouds that floated swiftly overhead. There are no trails through the dune field, but there seemed no danger of getting lost. When we needed to get our bearings, we simply climbed to the top of the nearest dune. Looking to the west, we could see the flat, windswept floor of the San Luis Valley reaching toward distant mountains. Rising behind us to the east were the snow-frosted heights of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, the dunes nestling, as if for protection, at their feet. And so we passed the morning, marvelling at everything from the tallest dune in North America, around 230 metres in height, to the smallest insect that dashed across the broiling surface.
We wandered for hours in a daze, cameras in hand, our senses overwhelmed by the intoxicating contrast of what seemed simultaneously a great wide nothingness, and a massive sea, teeming with life.
Wildlife abounded. An earlier amble through the small park museum acquainted us with the insects, birds and lizards that call the dunes home. Now, I know what you're thinking, a museum dedicated to sand does not exactly get the heart racing, but it was surprisingly informative with a variety of entertaining displays. Great Sand Dunes tiger beetles, I learned, are found nowhere else on the planet. In fact, because of it's rareness and colourful body, the half-inch-long beetle has become something of a local celebrity and the unlikely public face of the park.
At Great Sand Dunes National Park we found stimulation and deprivation at the same time; it was a mysterious and surprisingly spiritual void where time seemed meaningless and every grain of sand or windblown tumbleweed appeared absurdly singular. It didn't take long to understand what drove madmen, hippies and prophets to the desert places of the world. Every sight, smell and sound was unknown to our senses. This is what we had come for, and it was wonderful.