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And it’s there the park is investing in an ambitious project that’s symbolic of how land managers are approaching one of their biggest long-term issues: climate change.Įarlier this summer, President Barack Obama declared that climate change is the biggest issue the 100-year-old National Park Service now faces.

Few venture up into the mountains on the eastern side of the dunes.

These days, most visitors will play in the cool water of adjacent Medano Creek before they climb up one or two dunes. “I would rather go three days around, than travel once more over the sand hills with a wagon,” Wislizenus wrote more than 150 years ago, a thought echoed by many hikers since then. The 30-square-mile dune field offers a view unlike any other in Colorado. These dunes were created in this landlocked valley by prevailing winds that pick up sand and deposit it in the shadow of the Sangre De Cristo mountains. Friedrich Adolph Wislizenus, in his remembrance of an 1848 expedition to northern New Mexico.īut this isn’t the Arabian Peninsula. “A piece of Arabian desert transplanted into this plain,” wrote Dr. Then, as you rumble south down Highway 17 through Moffat and the other barely-holding-on valley towns, their wave-like ridges reveal a unique reality.įinally, as you turn east and head into the Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve, mountains of sand tower almost 800 feet over you and the valley floor. From Colorado Public Radio (Nathaniel Minor):Īt first, they look like a mirage on the edge of the horizon of southern Colorado’s broad and sweeping San Luis Valley.