Framedlight

We had had some lunch looking at the sand dunes then we set out to drive across the Saint Luis Valley and on north towards Salida. The valley floor was very flat but we stopped by an irrigation ditch to look back at the dunes and mountains. It was 86 miles to Salida and we finally arrived in the late afternoon. We were staying in a little motel so drove down into town to try and find something to eat. There was nothing we fancied, and we ended up going into a supermarket and buying some bread and frankfurters as there was a microwave in our room. Oh the glamour of travel!  

  We were driving north through Colorado towards Denver to catch our plane back to the UK and had stopped in Alamosa the previous night so that we could visit Great Sand Dunes the following day.  It was a great decision. These sand dunes, although they lack the whiteness of the dunes in New Mexico, make up for it in spades by the relative wildness of their situation. The park is not so ordered and neat as the White Dunes but feels a lot more natural. As we drove through the San Luis Valley towards the dunes they gradually emerged from the base of the mountains. These are the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, a southerly extension of the Rockies which run down along the eastern side of the Rio Grande rift all the way to to Santa Fé in New Mexico. The dunes are the highest in North America and are nowhere near the sea. The Saint Luis Valley once held a number of lakes which receded around 440,000 years ago, leaving behind large sand sheets. The winds in the valley blew the sand into a...