50 Fun Facts About Great Sand Dunes National Park

Great Sand Dunes National Park lies in the south-central part of which US state?

The dunes sit on the eastern edge of the San Luis Valley, a high desert basin roughly the size of Connecticut.

The park's dunes hold what continental record?

They rise up to 750 feet from the valley floor and hold an estimated 1.2 cubic miles of sand.

According to the National Park Service, which of these rises 750 feet from base to crest?

High Dune on the first ridge climbs only 699 feet from its base but starts on higher ground, so its crest is actually higher above sea level.

The main dune field covers roughly how many square miles?

The flatter, grassy sandy plain around it is far bigger and actually holds about 90 percent of all the sand in the park.

The Sangre de Cristo range behind the dunes is the southernmost subrange of which larger system?

They run from Poncha Pass down to Glorieta Pass near Santa Fe, and the northern stretch holds several fourteeners.

The name Sangre de Cristo is Spanish for what?

It may refer to the red alpenglow on snowy peaks; legend says they were the last words of a priest killed by Native Americans.

Which president proclaimed Great Sand Dunes a national monument in March 1932?

A women's civic group sponsored the bill after locals feared industry could destroy the dunes.

Which women's organisation sponsored the bill to protect the dunes as a national monument?

By the 1920s residents of the valley towns saw the dunes as a source of pride and potential tourist dollars.

In which year was Great Sand Dunes formally established as a national park and preserve?

Congress authorised the change in 2000; the new park and preserve is about four times the size of the old monument.

What threat to the dunes did the 1932 monument specifically aim to head off?

The Volcanic Mining Company built a mill that year to recover the metal from the sand, but the tiny returns never paid.

Visitors reaching the dunes in late spring must first wade across which wide, shallow stream?

It usually peaks from late May to early June and from July to April is often no more than a few inches deep, if it flows at all.

Water in the creek beside the dunes arrives in pulses. What is this rare phenomenon called?

Little sand dams form and collapse underwater about every 20 seconds, sending wave-like pulses that can reach 20 inches high in a wet year.

Sand surface temperatures on the dunes can reach what on a summer afternoon?

Rangers advise hiking early or late and wearing real shoes; sandals are not enough, and pets' paws blister quickly.

Which two sports, done on specially designed boards, are the park's signature activities?

Ordinary snowboards and cardboard do not slide well on the sand; the gear is rented just outside the entrance or in the nearest city.

The four-wheel-drive road past the dunes and over the mountains crosses the creek bed how many times?

The 22-mile unpaved route also includes four miles of deep sand and continues down into the Wet Mountain Valley.

Roughly how many recreational visitors did the park record in 2019?

That put it above half a million a year, still modest by national park standards.

Besides the dune field, mountain watershed and sabkha, what is the fourth part of the park's dune system?

The sand sheet is the largest piece; the sabkha is a seasonally flooded wetland where minerals like baking soda cement the sand into a white crust.

What is the sabkha, one of the park's four ecosystem components?

Groundwater rises and falls with the seasons, leaving white alkali deposits; inland saltgrass and avocets thrive there.

Geologists named the prehistoric lake that once covered the San Luis Valley after which town?

Discovered from lakebed deposits in 2002, it drained catastrophically through volcanic rock at the valley's south end, likely carving the Rio Grande Gorge near Taos.

The dark patches on the dunes are deposits of which magnetic mineral eroded from the mountains?

It is the most magnetic mineral in nature and heavier than quartz sand, so it stays put when the wind strips lighter grains away.

What moisture content beneath the dry surface helps hold the dunes together?

That dampness lets kangaroo rats, scurfpea, blowout grass and an endemic insect live in the dune field itself.

What dating technique do scientists use to try to work out the age of the dunes?

It measures how long quartz grains have been buried in the dark; results range from a few hundred to tens of thousands of years, so the dunes' age remains debated.

Which endemic insect, marked with a violin shape on its back, lives only in the park?

Its whole range is about 110 square miles, all inside the park, and it lives about two and a half years.

Per the National Park Service, how many insect species are found only at Great Sand Dunes?

They include a circus beetle, two ant-like flower beetles and still-undescribed species of clown beetle, moth and robber fly.

Over two thousand of which animal are ranched on Nature Conservancy land inside the park boundary?

The ranch property is fenced and closed to the public except on guided tours.

Which native trout swims in the park's streams?

The Rio Grande sucker and fathead minnow share the water with it.

Roughly how many bird species have been documented in the park and preserve?

They run from white-tailed ptarmigan and rosy finches on the tundra to burrowing owls in the grasslands and avocets in the wetlands.

What is the traditional Ute phrase for the dunes, Saa waap maa nache, said to mean?

The Jicarilla Apache called them Sei-anyedi, it goes up and down; the oldest human traces in the valley go back about 11,000 years.

Blanca Peak, just southeast of the dunes, is one of the four sacred mountains of which people?

They call it Sisnaajini, White Shell Mountain; it is the highest summit of the entire Sangre de Cristo range.

How tall is Blanca Peak, the fourth-highest summit in its state?

It is higher than any point in the United States east of its longitude, and two small glaciers survived on its north face until after 1903.

Which Spanish governor of New Mexico became the first recorded European in the San Luis Valley, in 1694?

His men hunted a herd of 500 buffalo in the southern valley before turning back to Santa Fe.

Whose 1807 journals contain the first written description of the dunes, comparing them to a stormy sea?

He climbed one of the sand hills with his spyglass and spotted the Rio Grande; the sand hills, he wrote, looked exactly like the sea in a storm.

After exploring past the dunes in 1807, the US Army lieutenant was captured by whom?

They were taken to Chihuahua for questioning and later escorted through Texas and released near Louisiana.

Which explorer proved the Sangre de Cristos could be crossed in winter in 1848, seeking a railroad route?

His party courted disaster; five years later Captain John Gunnison's topographical engineers crossed the dune field itself on horseback.

What did the Herard family, who homesteaded along the creek in 1875, establish in the stream?

They ran cattle in the mountain meadows and used the old pass road that today's 4WD track still follows.

The Trujillo family homestead near the dunes was declared what in 2004?

Teofilo Trujillo's sheep and cattle ranch later became part of the Zapata Ranch, owned by the Nature Conservancy since 1999.

Mosca Pass, whose toll road washed out in 1911, was also named after which fur trader?

The road was patched up several times from the 1930s to the 1950s but kept flooding out and is now a seven-mile round-trip hiking trail.

How high is the summit of the park's four-wheel-drive road over the Sangre de Cristos?

The pass comes at the 11.2-mile mark; the road then drops to State Highway 69 in the Wet Mountain Valley.

What is the highest point in the park and preserve, at 13,604 feet?

The low point near San Luis Lakes is 7,520 feet, a spread of more than 6,000 feet from sabkha to summit.

The dune field became a federally designated wilderness in which year?

It is the only US wilderness protecting a saltbush-greasewood ecosystem; the adjoining Sangre de Cristos followed in 1993.

When lightning strikes the dunes it fuses sand grains into a glassy tube called what?

The name comes from the Latin for lightning rock; like everything natural in the park, they must be left in place.

Which nearby waterfall drops about 30 feet and shelters nesting black swifts?

Reaching it means a half-mile hike, fording the stream and scrambling over rocks into a narrow crevice.

Big Spring Creek, a spring-fed stream in the park's wetlands, received what designation in 2012?

An unconfined aquifer feeds it, creating wetlands with rare species in an otherwise arid valley.

What is the closest city to the park, about 30 miles away by road to the southwest?

Fort Garland, 20 miles southeast, began as Fort Massachusetts in 1852 to protect settlers heading into the valley.

Roughly how big are the park and preserve combined?

The original 1932 monument covered just 35,528 acres; the park is now 107,342 acres and the preserve another 41,686.

How much precipitation do the dunes average in a year?

Evaporation is so high the area still counts as desert even though it just clears the 10-inch line; March is the snowiest month.

The Great Sand Dunes are estimated to contain more than how much sand?

That is roughly 5 billion cubic metres, yet the surrounding flat sand sheet still holds about 90 percent of all the sand in the park.

Which president signed the act redesignating Great Sand Dunes as a national park and preserve in November 2000?

The formal establishment followed in 2004 once land purchases such as the Nature Conservancy's Baca Ranch deal were complete.

How much did the Nature Conservancy pay for the 97,000-acre Baca Ranch in 2002?

Financing came from the Interior Department, the Colorado State Land Board and private donors.

The Great Sand Dunes Wilderness is the only US wilderness protecting which type of ecosystem?

Congress designated the 32,643-acre wilderness inside the monument in 1976.