Day 3 Colorado

We left our warm and cozy hotel bright and early and at a cheery 4 degrees!  The landscape is amazing!  So flat but mountains in the distance.  Lots of scrubby bushes make up most of it and with the snow it makes it a stark yet beautiful drive.  The temperature dips to -1 but we are going up in elevation.  




We arrive at Great Sand Dunes (Yeah, I didn't know there were sand dunes in Colorado either!) and we are too early for the visitor center but we can drive through the park and check out the dunes. We bundle up (It is up to 6 now!!) and head toward the trail head.  It is surreal as there is a heavy fog over everything so you can't really see the dunes!!  They are there somewhere!  We walk towards the middle of the Medano Creek which apparently is great fun during the rainy season, but for now it is a VAST sandy plain.  It is nearly 1/2 mile just to cross over so we decided to hike first and catch the visitor's center after.  How much should we hike?  All Trails (an app we use that shows trails all over that people have recorded) showed the trail to High Point as achievable (3 miles round trip) so we decide on that.  We aim where we think it is as from where we are starting out at the bottom all the dunes appear tall (At this point the fog is burning off so we can tell what we are getting into!).  We climb and climb some more.  Then we realize perhaps we are aiming for the wrong peak even though every peak is amazing, so we divert, which may or may not have involved crawling up a sandy hill.  More and more up and up and we stop when we reach 1.5 miles, not quite the highest peak but amazing just the same and we have ascended almost 1000 feet so we are good and extremely happy with our adventure up.  We made a couple of sand/snow angels since we could.  Because it is winter and it had just snowed and the temperature was very much below freezing the sand was frozen for the most part.  There were parts where you sank just like walking a beach dune and that was certainly a work out, but parts were frozen solid and gave us some solid footing for our ascent.  You can see for miles and miles and miles and it was an exhilarating hike.  Going down was MUCH easier!  We did have to slide down a few dunes on our bottoms as they were steeper going down for some reason!  Many people that visit bring their sleds just for this purpose and we actually did bring ours all the way from home! But we didn't want to go all the way back to the truck to experience what we did with just sliding down on our bottoms!!  :)





What an adventure!  We stopped in at the visitor center to get my park passport stamped and started on our way.

We passed through some quaint little towns as we headed out towards Mesa Verde.  Some small and not a lot going on, but some were definitely tourist destinations with ski slopes, snowmobiling, resorts, and more.  We did stop at a farm that sold elk and bison jerky and bought and sampled their wares.  Quite yummy!! 



The roads to Mesa Verde were for the most part good but occasionally we had ice and snow covered ones to deal with. This area received five years (!) worth of snow in just a week so there was so much to see as we drove.  Snow was deep on the roofs, and ginormous icicles nearly touched the ground.  The drifts were deep! 

We arrived at a campground that is generally not open during the winter to the general public.  There are a couple of campers here (One camper resident worked at the national park and the other was a student in the nearby town to save a bigger drive.) but due to the excessive snow they didn't have a site for us cleared out yet. The resident campers were snowed in! They said it was hard to get snow removal done as everyone in the area needed it done!  They let us just pull the truck in and set up our tent cube in their back driveway!  We had access to electricity for the heater and a warm laundry room where we had a rousing game of travel Scrabble. 

We did try out our snow shoes while it was still light.  Interesting is all I can say.  You have to make sure to bring each shoe up completely out of the snow or you'll tip over.  How do I know this?  :) The snow is so deep you can't even right yourself so thank goodness Andrew saved the day and got me back on my feet again.  We didn't grab our walking sticks but should have.  That would have kept us balanced a little better and helped me when I needed help getting back up.  

It was such a cute campground and such nice hosts!  We will need to go back!  




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