Day 6 – Great Sand Dunes National Park

Bent's Old Fort

Today was mostly a sightseeing day wrapped around about three hours of driving. We started the day at Bent's Old Fort which is just outside of La Junta, CO. It is a reconstructed 1840s adobe fur trading post on the Santa Fe Trail and back in the day it was on the US-Mexico border. How is that possible? The border in the 1840s was the Arkansas River before the Mexican-American War in 1846. 

Buffalo Press

The fort was pretty cool to walk through and you could just imagine how it was in 1840. The fort did a lot of buffalo hide trading and in one of the photos you can see a buffalo hide press, which is how they reduced the size before shipping.

Great Sand Dunes NP (from a distance)

After our drive, we went to see the Great Sand Dunes National Park. It is truly an amazing park and you can see it from at least 20 miles away. The park contains the highest sand dunes in North America and is over 30 square miles in size. We try to take a hike at every park and this is one of the more difficult ones. First, walking in the sand is difficult enough, but doing it at 7500 feet elevation is crazy. It normally takes a few days to get used to that level of altitude, so doing on the first day had us breathing hard. 

Great Sand Dunes (part way up)

From a distance it looks like no problem walking to the top, but when you get close, you see that the height is about the same as a 75 story building. We saw some people at the top, but they were like ants. No way were we even going to come close. We made it up about two dunes in height and then watched several people sand boarding down.