Great Sand Dunes National Park United States

Legendary

Sandboard or sled the largest sand dunes in North America.

Photo by U.S. Department of the Interior

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In the 1920s, mining companies looked at these dunes and saw money. They wanted to run the sand through machines to extract the tiny flecks of gold mixed into it.

Local residents were horrified and petitioned Congress to stop it. In 1932, President Herbert Hoover signed the bill that made the dunes a national monument.

The dunes sit in the San Luis Valley in southern Colorado, right up against the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. They're the tallest sand dunes in North America, rising about 750 feet from the valley floor.

That's roughly as tall as a 70-story building, made entirely of loose sand.

The sand got there over tens of thousands of years. Lakes once covered this valley, and when they dried up, the wind picked up the exposed sand and carried it northeast until the mountains stopped it.

The mountains act like a wall. Sand blows in, hits the peaks, and piles up instead of blowing away.

People have been here a very long time. Archaeologists have found stone tools showing hunters lived around the dunes nearly 11,000 years ago.

Much later, the Ute, Navajo, and Apache peoples all traveled through and lived in this valley. The Ute still have ancestral ties to the region today.

An American explorer named Zebulon Pike crossed the mountains in 1807 and became the first American on record to see the dunes. In his journal he wrote that they looked exactly like a sea in a storm.

The monument grew considerably in 2000, adding tens of thousands of acres of mountains and sand deposits. Congress made the whole thing a national park in 2004.

Climb High Dune for the best view over the whole dunefield, though there are no marked trails, so you just pick a ridge and go. Rent a sandboard or sled from outside the park and ride back down. Visit in late spring when Medano Creek flows at the base of the dunes, creating a shallow stream that kids can splash in with a mountain of sand behind them.