Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado is a really fun place! It’s also visually stunning… huge white sand dunes in front of the darker Sangre de Cristo mountain range. Amazingly picturesque.
After reading about Great Sand Dunes National Park, Trent had his heart set on hiking to the top of Star Dune, which is the tallest dune in North America at 750 feet. I thought, no way, that is a major commitment, hiking up 750 feet in SOFT SAND! Sounds pretty exhausting, especially because the sun is shining very brightly from above and the sand heats up just like at the beach in the summer. Bright sun, hot sand, and hiking 750 feet up in soft sand… sounded like a recipe for disaster to me! Or at least a recipe for really whiny kids!
We also knew we wanted to go sand boarding (like snow boarding) and sand sledding. We rented one sand board and one sand sled from the rental shop just outside of the park. We had no idea what we were getting ourselves into, but we had until 7pm to figure it out!
Like everyone, we started on the small dunes. The sand board was definitely more difficult than the sand sled, but we were all having fun on both.
After the small dunes, we started making our way over towards the base of High Dune (the second largest dune) and Star Dune. We sledded and boarded along the way, and the dunes were getting bigger.
We started the trek up the big dunes and it was not an easy task. We figured we would see how far we could get before the complaining commenced. To our surprise, the boys loved every bit of the climb and didn’t complain at all. We made a couple of stops for water, but other than that, they just kept climbing without a word. They were determined!
We made it!!! It was super windy up there and sand was whipping us everywhere.
If you didn’t do a handstand on top of the tallest dune in North America, were you ever even really there?!
Now it was time to head down… luckily we had the best way ever to do that! Those dunes were huge and our crazy boys were fearless! Notice that no one is standing on the sand board anymore… after a few hard landings (OUCH!!!), we realized it was way more fun (and less painful) to lie/sit on it. Those tiny black dots are the boys! (And yes, you have to walk back up the dune to slide again… no chair lifts here!)
Although the rental peeps warned us not to, we realized that doubling up on the sled and board was totally fine… and fun!
We really had the best time, and isn’t is just gorgeous?!
We took a bunch of video, here are a few. There were some spills, but luckily no serious injuries.
This video is from pretty early on in our sand sledding adventures. Small hill, squirrelly sledding.
Here are some others, including Brian on the sand board.
Really looks like a great family fun day ! Happy the boys hung in there so well. Bet you guys were ALL pooped after that. Doesn’t look too, too hot. About how high were you at the bottom of the dunes ?
It was so fun, we all loved it! Luckily some clouds moved in and it got cooler just a little while after we arrived. Everyone fell asleep immediately that night! I think we were at about 8,000 feet elevation at the bottom.