I had been to White Sands National Park before and figured the Great Sand Dunes were probably going to be similar, but despite having visited other sand dunes before, the Great Sand Dunes really blew me away because they were well…great (aka massive)!
Sandboarding
There isn’t a ton of “hiking” to do in the Great Sand Dunes – we considered hiking to Star Dune (the tallest dune in North America) for maybe a second, but it would’ve been a hot, long, and not particularly rewarding hike (mostly a lot of walking with the same scenery).
Instead, we rented sandboards and went sandboarding which was an amazing time.
I love snowboarding so obviously was excited. We decided to just go in cold, straight for the tallest dune so hiked to the top of High Dune (which is the tallest dune you can see from the parking lot) and picked the steepest part to start. Obviously, I immediately fell and got sand all over myself, but it was really fun. I ended up washing sand out from my ears, clothes, everywhere for days.
Zapata Falls
Like I mentioned before, there aren’t a ton of traditional “hikes” in the actual park, but right outside there is this short but really fun/unique hike to Zapata Falls. The hike requires walking through/across a small creek and through a short slot canyon to see the actual waterfall, but on a hot day it’s the perfect thing to do to cool off and get a change of scenery after a day in the dunes.
As an added bonus, we got this cool view of the sand dunes from afar.
Note: the drive up to the trailhead is along a bumpy, unpaved road which was pretty rough for our little sedan. It’s doable, but it was so bumpy we gave up and just left our car and walked the rest of the way up.
Night Hike & Stargazing
Great Sand Dunes is an International Dark Sky park so it’s one of the best places to go stargazing! The park is open 24 hours so after we finished the Zapata Falls hike, we came back into the park (with our headlamps in tow!) to do a night hike and see the stars.
Because it’s in the desert, it gets cold at night, so we bundled up! We didn’t have to go very far into the dunes to get darkness and a great view of the stars.
Here’s a picture of the sun setting on the sand dunes with the moon overhead, taken on my new iPhone which takes surprisingly decent night photos now:
Alamosa
We spent the night in Alamosa, a small town nearby, which had a lovely little Main Street with lots of great food options.
We had breakfast at Roast, a fun roastery/brewery – they had amazing biscuits and gravy and coffee!