This story originally appeared in the Sunday, September 30, 2007 edition of The Kansas City Star
"Their appearance was exactly that of a sea in storm, except as to color, not the least sign of vegetation existing thereon."
-- Zebulon Pike, the first American to record his impressions of the Great Sand Dunes, 1807
GREAT SAND DUNES NATIONAL PARK, Colo. | Chh ... chh ... chh.
I listened carefully as my tennis shoes dug into the shifting sand. It was the only sound I heard on a soft summer morning. Chh ... chh ... chh.
Around me, a canvas of uninterrupted beige stretched for miles, a sea of sand that rose hundreds of feet into the air and met a brilliant blue sky. And I had it all to myself.
Almost.
Far ahead I could see two other hikers, using their hands and feet as they scrambled toward the top of the next dune. Otherwise I was absolutely alone, surrounded by 30 square miles of sand dunes, the tallest in North America.
So where was everybody else? Didn’t they know? Hadn’t they heard?
Although the sun hadn’t yet burned much heat into the dunes, park rangers warned it would. The dunes can reach temperatures of 140 degrees in summer.So morning, especially in summer, is prime time for exploring Great Sand Dunes National Park, about 240 miles southwest of Denver. There are castles to build in the wet, spongy sand along Medano Creek. Tiny footprints to decipher -- beetles? kangaroo rats? -- where the drier ground grows softer and steeper. Sand to roll down, slide down, even ski down. And always, sand dunes to climb.
Chh ... chh ... chh.
A closer look
The dunes can be deceptive.
What seems at first like a monochromatic landscape becomes on closer inspection a mosaic of color, flecked with dark brown, gray, black, silver, white and even clear grains of sand.
Likewise, the land that might seem inhospitable to life is teeming with it. About 20 varieties of plants, including sunflowers and grasses, grow in the sand. At least seven species of insects -- tiger beetles, circus beetles, crickets and moths, among them -- exist only in these dunes. Kangaroo rats live their entire lives here, hunted by weasels, bobcats and coyotes that arrive from surrounding areas after dark.
The sand blows -- sometimes violently -- and creates new patterns and ridges. It is carried by streams and moved by erosion.
As I trudged toward my destination, I looked at my newly created footsteps and the hundreds, thousands of others that spread out before me, wondering, "How long have these been here? How long will my footprints remain? A day? A week?"
One day’s patterns can be gone with the wind the next, yet the tallest dunes are remarkably stable. The National Park Service compared a photograph taken in 1874 with one from 1999 and found that, visually, the dunes hadn’t changed much.
But 133 years is nothing. The dunes formed thousands of years ago when an ancient lake disappeared in the San Luis Valley, nestled between the San Juan and Sangre de Cristo mountain ranges in south-central Colorado. Opposing wind patterns carved the remaining sand deposits into the dunes. They still do.
Wildlife and a pet
Kayla Blackburn of Aurora, Colo., and her friend Jennie Correa of Newark, N.J., bent over a spigot in the dunes parking lot, spraying dirty dishes. Blackburn’s dog, a Lab mix named Malcolm, waited impatiently in the front seat of her SUV.
"I try to come here every year," said Blackburn, who works as a school bus driver in Aurora and studies occupational therapy in Denver. "I love it. It’s so different."
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