On Monday, July 31, 2023, Andy, Kathrin, Sean, and I spent the day at Mount Rainier National Park. Our primary goal had been to get up on the mountain early and do “one great hike.” One route that a friend of Kathrin had recommended, the Tipsoo Lake and Naches Peak Loop, had a five-star rating with an easy-to-moderate difficulty rating in my hiking guide. It seemed perfect, and in fact it was.
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Saturday, February 18, 2023 was our last full day in Moab, and Sean and I planned to spend it up in the Island in the Sky District of Canyonlands National Park. We had been there the previous Sunday to start the trip’s adventures, and now we we would bookend the trip with a return to see the things we had missed, including a very famous arch. And we also wanted to go on a proper hike, finally.
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Sean and I arrived at the Windows Section of Arches National Park less than half an hour before sunset on Friday, February 17, 2023. We were surprised that, while not exactly busy, the area wasn’t all-but-abandoned, like the part of the Park we’d just come from. The winter sunset was muffled by high, thin clouds that softened and diffused the light as we wandered on the easy paths around the area, taking in the views.
This post is mostly photos.
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Late in the afternoon of Friday, September 17, Sean and I headed up into Arches National Park one last time (on this second trip to Moab, at least). There were two major Arches, both near the Devils Garden section of the Park, that we still had never seen: Broken Arch and Sand Dune Arch. During our other times in the Park, both on this trip and the previous year, we’d simply prioritized hiking to other arches. After Sean had unfortunately had to spend the majority of that day working, at least he’d be able to get out and stretch his legs in some astounding scenery.
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Rock art is not an artifact. It is an action still happening.
When I see petroglyphs and pictographs, basic questions come to mind. What do these figures and symbols convey to me now, what did they say to people in their time, and how do they fit with other sites and repeated motifs, stories being told across distances? The entire Colorado Plateau, around 250,000 square miles of mostly exposed rock, is an open book. The questions move on from what am I reading to where am I on the land? How did I get here, and how did they get here? What are the flute players playing? A resplendent person depicted holding a snake by one outstretched arm means what?
– Craig Childs, Tracing Time, Seasons of Rock Art on the Colorado Plateau
Overnight into Tuesday, February 14, 2023, it started to snow. It would continue to snow off and on for the next two days. So Sean and I hunkered down in Moab on Valentine’s Day and then spent the following day exploring the astonishing rock art near town.
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It was late in the afternoon of Monday, February 13, 2023, and Sean’s and my day at Capitol Reef National Park was swiftly concluding, but we had time for a drive along the relatively short scenic drive and one quick hike to see more Hisatsinom petroglyphs deep in Capitol Gorge. It turned out that we got to see the cliffs of the Waterpocket Fold just when the mid-winter late afternoon light was its most gorgeous.
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For roughly one thousand years, from 300 to 1300 CE, the Hisatsinom people lived across what is now Utah. They left behind distinctive pottery and a distinctive style of rork art. Archaeologists call them the Fremont, named after the river that cuts through Capitol Reef National Park.
On Monday afternoon, February 13, 2023, Sean and I got to visit an extraordinary series of Hisatsinom petroglyph panels along the Fremont River in the heart of Canyonlands National Park. This was our first visit to such sacred sites on a trip that would be full of these encounters.
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On Sunday, February 12, 2023, Sean and I concluded our first afternoon in Canyonlands National Park with a visit to a giant hole in the earth. In a landscape rich with dramatic topography, Upheaval Dome in the northwest portion of the Island in the Sky, is a unique mystery. Scientists are unsure how this two-mile wide, basically round hole formed.
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Established in 1964 during the Lyndon Johnson Administration, Canyonlands National Park protects over 337,000 acres of the Colorado Plateau in southeastern Utah. It is adjacent to Glen Canyon National Recreation Area to the west, Deadhorse Point State Park tothe northeast, and Bears Ears National Monument to the south/southeast. At the heart of Canyonlands National Park is the confluence of two of the West’s most famous rivers, the Colorado and the Green. These rivers are foundational to the Park’s wildly eroded landscape, filled with sheer cliffs, towering buttes and hoodoos, sinuous canyons, and expansive flats. The Park is divided into three main districts, dictated by geology. To the southeast is The Needles, defined by the rock formations and hoodoos for which it’s named. To the southwest is The Maze, remote and rugged canyon country. To the north is the Island in the Sky, a great peninsula jutting south some 2,200 feet above the confluence of the rivers.
On the afternoon of Sunday, February 12, 2023, Sean and I took in some big views from the Island in the Sky.
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On the afternoon of Wednesday, November 16, 2022, my Bold Bison co-owner, Patrick, and I continued our day of desert adventure in the Rincon Mountain District on the east side of Saguaro National Park. We had already spent the morning in the Tucson Mountain District to the west and had had lunch in Tucson as we headed east to the Rincons. It was the final day of my week-and-a-day-long birthday trip to Tucson before heading home to Chicago the next day.
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Wednesday, November 16, 2022 was a Bold Bison day of adventure in the desert. Patrick and I had the day mostly to ourselves after the successful video shoots the previous day. We had captured basically all of the footage we’d need for the project, so anything we got today would be gravy. We had built this day into the trip as a safeguard, and honestly as an adventure day. It was my final full day in Tucson after being there for a week already, and I was looking forward to checking out a few things in Saguaro National Park that I hadn’t seen yet. Our plan was to catch the sunrise (again) in the Tucson Mountain District and then sunset in the Rincon Mountain District.
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Monday, November 14, 2022 was a transition day. Sean was set to fly home to Chicago in the morning. Then in the afternoon, Patrick would arrive and we would shift into Bold Bison work mode, shooting interviews and footage for a video project. For me, it felt like an instant revisit to Saguaro National Park. The initial exploration of the Park with Sean was complete. And now it was time for a second visit connected to work travel, except that there was a gap of only a couple hours, rather than months or years, between one and the other.
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Our day in the Rincon Mountain District of Saguaro National Park—Friday, November 11, 2022—was coming to a close. We had greeted the sun that morning in the Saguaro forest, and we would say goodbye to the sun from the forest too. The next day would be my birthday, and we’d spend it exploring Tucson.
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On the afternoon of Friday, November 11, 2022, Sean and I continued our exploration of the Rincon Mountain District of Saguaro National Park with a hike up a portion of Tanque Verde Ridge Trail. It allowed us to quickly reach some great views of the entire northern reaches of the Santa Cruz Valley, which encompasses Tucson, and the mountains that encircle the city. The trail climbs for eleven miles up a southwest-northeast trending ridge into the heart of the Rincon Mountains high country. But on this afternoon, we only did the first one and a half miles, which was still a vertical rise of over seven hundred feet.
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Friday morning, November 11, 2022, Sean and I were up early. We planned to spend the day exploring the eastern side of Saguaro National Park, the Rincon Mountain District, beginning with a Ranger-led sunrise hike to greet the dawn in the Sonoran Desert. Later we would go on a hike up Tanque Verde Ridge, and then wander around in the Saguaro Forest.
But first, sunrise.
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On Thursday, November 10, 2022, Sean and I finished up our afternoon on the western side of Saguaro National Park by exploring some of the Tucson Mountain District’s northernmost areas, including sunset under Panther Peak (3,435 feet).
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In 1978, Congress established Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve, which combined an existing National Park unit with a Louisiana State Park and a French Quarter Visitor Center to create a National Park unit with a broad mandate to preserve and interpret the Mississippi River Delta region and southern Louisiana. That the Park is named after an enslaved people-smuggling pirate who was also a war hero underscores the complex layers of history, laid down like delta silt, in the region. Historically, the National Historical Park focuses on the Battle of New Orleans (the final battle of the War of 1812) and the pirate/privateer Jean Lafitte. Culturally, the Park focuses on New Orleans’ French Quarter, Creole culture, and Acadian/Cajun culture. Ecologically, the Park preserves 23,000 acres of bayous, swamps, marshes, and surrounding uplands at Barataria Preserve south of New Orleans, between the city and the Gulf of Mexico.
It was to Barataria Preserve that Sean and I were headed immediately after attending a jazz concert on the afternoon of Tuesday, September 13 [2022].
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On Tuesday, July 26 [2022], I continued my solo circumnavigation of the Olympic Peninsula and Olympic National Park. This was both my second visit to Olympic and only the second time I’d visited a National Park alone. (The first was the previous November when I stopped at Great Sand Dunes National Park for a hike on my drive home from New Mexico). The first time I’d visited Olympic (a decade earlier in April 2012), it had been with Sean and Kathrin. But on that day too we did a day of highlights on a long drive between Portland and Seattle. Someday, I’ll visit Olympic and stay a while.
That April day with Kathrin and Sean, the weather had been more expected (cool, rainy). But on this late July day, it was 90 degrees at Hoh Rainforest, my next stop. It made for a completely different experience.
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On Sunday, July 10 [2022], we technically had the day off, but—as we had during our Texas adventure and as we would again on future Bold Bison trips—Patrick and I spent the day hiking, this time in Kings Canyon National Park. Often with Bold Bison, our work responsibilities and recreational activities blend, and they would on this day. In addition to hiking in Kings Canyon proper, we continued capturing photos and video footage of the devastation wrought by the KNP Complex Fire.
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After our time in Oregon and San Francisco, Bold Bison’s summer 2022 West Coast tour continued in the southern Sierra Nevada. We had been engaged by Sequoia Parks Conservancy (SPC), the nonprofit friends group for Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, to help them tell the story of, and to continue raising recovery funds for, the KNP Complex Fire that had raged through the Parks and their Sequoia Groves in 2021.
The KNP Complex Fire storytelling project was actually the second project we’d had with Sequoia Parks Conservancy. The first was creating the brand and website for the Giant Sequoia Lands Coalition, whose members include the National Park Service, USDA Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, US Geological Survey, Tule River Indian Tribe, State of California, University of California Berkeley, and Tulare County, along with nonprofit partners, Save the Redwoods League, Giant Sequoia Monument Association, and Sequoia Parks Conservancy.
So on Thursday, July 7 [2022], Patrick and I picked up our rental car—an alarmingly fuel inefficient Toyota Four Runner—in downtown San Francisco, crossed the Bay Bridge, and continued down the Central Valley toward Sequoia National Park.
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In the summer of 2022, I was on the road for Bold Bison for thirty-five days, with the vast majority on the West Coast. Combining multiple projects and meetings into one long trip was a way to be able to be onsite with our clients as inexpensively as possible. In addition, I was able to revisit a few National Park units, both on official business and on my downtime. Any unit I visited would have to be a revisit of a Park I’d already been to with Sean so that we didn’t get misaligned. Still coming out of the pandemic, having a good long time on the road was good for my mental health, although I was disappointed that Sean wasn’t able to join for at least part of the adventure.
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Almost 7,500 years ago, around the year 5446 BCE by modern calendars, a star exploded, sending incredibly bright light out into space. The light from that supernova reached Earth on July 4, 1054. Chinese astronomers recorded a bright new star that suddenly appeared in the sky. It was so bright that it was visible both day and night for months.
Halfway around the world, Chaco was near the height of its power, a ceremonial and administrative city and center of trade whose grandeur was unmatched in the Ancestral Puebloan world. A culture deeply attuned to the cosmos—multiple structures at Chaco were oriented to the solstices and equinoxes—the Chacoans would have born witness to the new star. It is possible that they recorded the supernova—now faded into what modern astronomers know as the Crab Nebula in the constellation Taurus—on a remarkable pictograph panel near the western end of Chaco Canyon.
Continuing our day in Chaco Canyon on May 20 [2022], Sean and I determined to hike to see the Supernova Pictograph.
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Tuesday, March 22, [2022] was our final afternoon on St. John. Hungry after our six-plus-mile hike to and around Reef Bay, we had a leisurely lunch at Miss Lucy’s very close to where we were staying at Concordia. The next day we would have to say goodbye to St. John and make our trip by boat, plane, and car back to wintry Chicago.
But we still had time for a couple more adventures.
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Nestled in a valley near the center of the south side of St. John, there is a grotto of freshwater, a sort of naturally occurring cistern. Near the water’s edge is a collection of petroglyphs depicting what appear to be faces and symbolic shapes. The petroglyphs were made by the Taíno people, who inhabited the Greater Antilles and the northern Lesser Antilles at the time Columbus’ invasion began in 1492. This place of reliable freshwater was clearly important to the Taíno. It was to this most remote part of Virgin Islands National Park that our adventures would take us on Tuesday, March 22 [2022], our last full day on St. John.
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On Monday, March 21 [2022], we went snorkeling at Waterlemon Cay, one of the premiere snorkeling sites in Virgin Islands National Park. Skipping it on our first trip had been my biggest regret, so I was very excited to see what it had to offer.
Transferred to the National Park Service upon the establishment of Virgin Islands National Park in 1956, Annaberg preserves and interprets the legacy of chattel slavery in the Danish West Indies, which supported St. John’s small piece in the Caribbean’s massive and world-altering cane sugar industry. Located on a bluff on the island’s north side, and commanding an astonishing view, the site was unexpectedly our destination on Sunday morning, March 20 [2022], the vernal equinox.
For Sean and me, this was a return. Read about our first visit to Annaberg here.
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On Saturday, March 19 [2022], we decided to stay over on the eastern side of St. John, nearer to our home base at Concordia. We hadn’t actually been planning to go into Cruz Bay every single day of the trip, but somehow had. Also, we figured that with it being the weekend the more famous beaches like Trunk Bay were probably going to be packed. So we decided it would be a good day to return to a favorite bay from Sean’s and my previous trip: Brown Bay, nestled on the north side of St. John—almost to East End—and accessible only by a hike two-hundred feet up and over a ridge. On our first trip to Virgin Islands National Park, Brown Bay offered the most spectacular snorkeling of the trip. The return didn’t disappoint.
To close out our first full day at Virgin Islands National Park, and to raise a toast to Saint Patrick’s Day [2022], we hiked to the southeastern most point on St. John, the sheer-cliffed peninsula of Ram Head. The hike to Ram Head is splendid, and it was a highlight of our first visit to the National Park. But first we had our first dip into the Caribbean Sea of the trip, an afternoon swim at Saltpond Bay.
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Late afternoon on Sunday, February 13 [2022], we capped our time at Arches National Park with the hike to Delicate Arch, one of the iconic views in the entire National Park system. Strategically, we decided to do the hike not only on Superbowl Sunday, but actually during the playing of the game. It was a smart move. We had gorgeous late afternoon light and there were only about a dozen folks there with us.
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On Sunday, February 13 [2022], we spent the second of our two days in Arches National Park. We centered the day around two celebrated hikes: Devils Garden and Delicate Arch. Devils Garden Trail is a loop route twisting through a broken landscape at the end of the Park Road. In some portions it is a broad path. In other sections it involves scrambling over slickrock. The complete hike with all side trails to see arches and other formations is a solid 7.8 miles.
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By early afternoon of Saturday, February 12 [2022], we were halfway through our first of two days exploring Arches National Park. Already we’d gotten in a solid two-hour hike and checked out some of the famous roadside formations. We knew that we would be doing the longer hike at Devils Garden the next day. And our plan for the extremely popular Delicate Arch hike was to go at the end of the day on Sunday, during the Superbowl. So for the rest of that Saturday afternoon, we decided to check out the Visitor Center and more short hikes and formations along the Park Road. But first lunch.
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On the morning of Saturday, February 12 [2022], we decided to do our first real hike at Arches National Park, an out-and-back to Tower Arch. The sandy, sometimes steep hike is a very scenic 3.4-miles ending at an arch that spans an impressive ninety-two feet. Tower Arch is one of the most remote large arches in the Park, so getting over to the trailhead was fun too.
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On Saturday, November 20 [2021], I departed Taos, headed ultimately home to Chicago. By the time I reached home the following Tuesday (two days before Thanksgiving), I had passed through Denver and Kansas City. But before that, I couldn’t resist stopping for a short hike at Great Sand Dunes National Park. After all, it was only an hour and forty-five minutes from Taos. And it was on the way. Sort of. It would be the first time I ever visited a National Park by myself.
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Established in 1990 and co-administered by the National Park Service and the City of Albuquerque, Petroglyph National Monument protects 7,236 acres of West Mesa west of Albuquerque, New Mexico and the Rio Grande. One of the largest concentrations of petroglyphs in North America, more than 20,000 petroglyphs dating as far back as 5,000 years are found in the Monument.
On Tuesday, November 16 [2021], Sean and I visited the Monument’s Boca Negra Canyon area for a morning of exploration before he flew home to Chicago.
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Established in 1916, Bandelier National Monument protects 33,677 acres of the Pajarito Plateau on the southern slopes of the volcanic Jemez mountains, located west of the Rio Grande Valley and Santa Fe in northern New Mexico. Over twenty-three thousand acres of the Monument are federally protected wilderness. But the heart of Bandelier is the thousands of Ancestral Puebloan sites scattered across the plateau and its steep canyons. Among these, the many sites in Frijoles Canyon are the most famous and dramatic. The hub of visitation in Bandalier, this canyon was where Sean and I headed for our all-too-short visit to the Monument on November 13 [2021].
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We rounded out my birthday visit to White Sands National Park on November 12 [2021] with the 4pm Ranger-led sunset hike. It was a chance to see what this special place had to show us in terms of light, shadow, and texture. And it capped the first day of a long weekend together enjoying New Mexico.
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On the afternoon of November 12 [2021], my birthday, Sean and I continued to explore White Sands National Park. After our hike on the Park’s longest marked trail, we wanted to see two of its other, much shorter interpretive hikes/walks in the transition areas between desert, grassland, and dunes.
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White Sands National Park protects 145,762 acres of soft gypsum sand dunes and adjacent Chihuahuan Desert transition zones in the Tularosa Basin of southern New Mexico. It was first protected as a National Monument in January 1933 in the waning days of the Hoover administration. On December 20, 2019, congress upgraded it to a National Park, increasing its total area by some 2,000 acres and making it the sixty-second of sixty-three National Parks.
Earlier plans to consider expanding the monument were ultimately subsumed into the Tularosa Basin’s military use and legacy. The Park is surrounded by White Sands Missile Range and is adjacent to Holloman Air Force Base. The Trinity Site, where the first atomic bomb was detonated in 1945, is about sixty miles from White Sands National Park in the northern part of the Tularosa Basin.
The deep time legacy of the place was underscored in September 2021 when researchers announced the discovery of 23,000-year-old human footprints in the Park, hard evidence that not only had humans arrived in the Americas earlier than standard textbooks claim, but they had pushed far into the interior of North America some 10,000 years earlier than the 13,000-years-ago date that had until recently been accepted by mainstream archaeology.
Truly, White Sands is a special place.
For my forty-third birthday on November 12, 2021, Sean and I spent the whole day exploring the Park, the third birthday I’ve now spent in the Chihuahuan Desert.
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It wasn’t much past dawn on Sunday, November 7 [2021] when Patrick and I pulled into the parking area of Pine Springs Visitor Center at Guadalupe Mountains National Park. On this day off in our very busy Texas video shoot, we wanted to do a hike or hikes in the Park. Neither of us was particularly keen for the elevation gains we’d need to get up into the Park’s high country, so we opted for a front country hike: the El Capitan/Salt Basin Overlook loop. It was long at 11.5 miles, but its elevation gain was modest, and it was rated “moderate” by the Park Service, so it sounded perfect. It ended up being a very tough hike.
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Our 2021 roadtrip to Colorado (and Utah) was sixteen full days and fifteen nights on the road. For a National Parks trip that was somewhat born of circumstance—buying a car, strategizing a post-lockdown COVID-era trip—this trip would have a huge influence on the year to come, both for Sean’s and my Park trips and for the shape of Bold Bison’s business travel. It has also reoriented us—or me—a bit to thinking about the continent. Our first taste of the Ancestral Puebloan world at Mesa Verde would inspire Sean and me to visit four more Ancestral Puebloan sites in the year to come, culminating in a May 2022 sojourn to Chaco Canyon. I would return to Great Sand Dunes National Park by myself—solidifying my infatuation with the San Luis Valley and the Sangre de Cristos—only a little over two months after this trip. We would return to Denver twice more. And flirting with the Colorado Plateau would lead to a February 2022 trip to Arches National Park (and a planed return to Moab in 2023).
But all that is to come. First, it’s time to wrap up this adventure.
We ended our time in Dinosaur National Monument on the afternoon of Friday, September 3 (2021) and began a holiday weekend journey home to Chicago that was itself an adventure. But first we had one more hike—stroll really—out at the end of Cub Creek Road before breaking camp and heading out.
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The Fremont People lived in what is now Utah, Idaho, Colorado, and Nevada for roughly the 1,000 years from 300 to 1,300. Unlike their contemporaries and neighbors, the Ancestral Puebloans in the Four Corners region (and later along the Rio Grande), the Fremont did not build permanent architecture like pueblos and cliff dwellings. Their villages were more ephemeral, and much of what we know about them comes from the tools and the art they left behind. The art, in the form of striking pictographs and petroglyphs, is often sublime.
On Friday, September 3 (2021), we knew that, one way or another, we’d have to be leaving Dinosaur National Monument early. But we didn’t want to go without seeing the grand Fremont petroglyphs near the campground.
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After our morning visiting the Dinosaur Quarry and early afternoon checking out the paved portion of Cub Creek Road, we spent the remainder of the afternoon of Thursday, September 2 (2021) driving into the center of Dinosaur National Monument’s canyon country, just across the state line in Colorado. Our ultimate destination was the hike out to Harpers Corner, high above the Green River near its confluence with the Yampa River.
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Tuesday, August 31, the alarm clocks on our phones woke us a little after dawn. After dozing a bit longer, Sean and I climbed out of the tent to prepare for the day. “We have to go see Painted Rock,” Sean kept saying groggily. Indeed, we wanted to go and see the morning light on the Painted Wall—the highest cliff in Colorado—before going to the Ranger Walk at 9am. Then it would be off to the north rim for the rest of the day.
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Beyond the end of the road, Warner Point Trail leads to the highest point on Black Canyon of the Gunnison’s south rim. Named for minister Mark Warner, whose dogged advocacy led to the canyon’s protection as a National Monument in 1933, the trail is a short three quarters of a mile each way. As the afternoon of August 30 continued, we decided to hike out to see the view.
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Our splendid day, Saturday, August 28, continued with an afternoon on Chapin Mesa, where we filled in some of the gaps of the 700 Years Tour we’d been on the day before. The centerpiece of the afternoon was our hike to see the panel of Ancestral Puebloan rock art at Petroglyph Point and making a few trail friends along the way.
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On Wednesday, August 25, the 105th birthday of the National Park Service, Sean and I ventured into the dunefield of Great Sand Dunes National Park. We’d gazed on it from varying distances for two days, but now it was time to experience it closely. On this second full day in the Park, we wanted to prioritize the dunes, but we also wanted to hike in them first thing while it was still cool and before the day heated up and made the experience less pleasant.
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On the afternoon of Tuesday, August 24, we continued exploring the parts of Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve that were not actually the dunes proper. We’d decided to save them for the following morning, when temperatures would be cooler. We toyed with the idea of driving to a trailhead on the other (eastern) side of the Sangre de Cristo Range to hike to a couple of alpine lakes high in the range, but the drive was almost two and a half hours.
So instead we opted for Mosca Pass Trail, which leads from near the Visitor Center complex up into the Sangre de Cristos to a low pass between the San Luis Valley and the Wet Mountains Valley. The hike was 3.5 miles to the crest of the pass, then 3.5 miles back to the trailhead. The Falcon Guide rated it Easy. We figured it would be a nice end to a day of hiking around the foothills zone between the dunefield and the mountains.
We were wrong.
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Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve protects 149,000 acres of dune field, transition zone, and a portion of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in south central Colorado. The Park and Preserve was authorized by Congress in the waning days of the Clinton administration in 2000 and established in 2004 under the Bush administration. The dunes proper had received earlier protection in the waning days of the Hoover administration in 1932 after local communities became alarmed that the dunes might be destroyed for industrial use for gold mining or concrete production.
That the tallest sand dunes in North America rise above the enormous, flat, high-elevation (above 7,000 feet) San Luis Valley in Colorado—and not in, say Death Valley, nor the Mojave, Sonoran, or Chihuahuan Deserts, places generally much sandier than the valley—is a unique circumstance of geography. The sand that comprises the dunes comes mainly from the San Juan Mountains dozens of miles to the west across the broad, flat valley. Sediment washed down from the mountains by snowmelt, rain, and the Rio Grande, whose headwaters are in the San Juans and which begins its long journey to the Gulf of Mexico by emerging into the San Luis Valley. Sandy sediment is deposited on the western side of the valley and then blown by the prevailing winds rushing down from the San Juans. The Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the southernmost range in the Rockies, run north-south for 242 miles, but the dunes formed only in a nook just north of Mount Blanca, the range’s highest peak and a sacred mountain to a number of Native American peoples. The dunes formed adjacent to a relatively low saddle in the range where three major ephemeral springs flow down into the valley. The streams, which secure the sand, are important for the stability of the dunes and for the hardy plant communities that grow from the extensive sand flats surrounding the dunes proper. But it is the storm winds rushing down from the low saddle in the Sangre de Cristos that balance the prevailing winds from the west, keeping the dunes themselves remarkably stable over years and decades.
Even with the uniqueness of the region’s wind and geography, the sheer amount of sand cannot be explained just by this process. More recent evidence suggests that the southern end of the San Luis Valley was once covered by a vast lake, remnants of which are visible as wetland complexes west and south of the dunes and a vast aquifer beneath the valley, which makes agriculture possible. It is the sand of this ancient lakebed that comprises the bulk of the dunes.
Tuesday, August 24, we’d spend exploring this singular place by getting to know the transition area between the dunes and the mountains.
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Tuesday, October 29 was a quiet day. We mostly took it easy and rested or explored Havasu Canyon areas closer to the campground. We needed to marshal our strength for the big hike back out of the canyon the following day. And we were worried about Rick’s hurt knee. The slower day also afforded us the opportunity to check out the tiny village of Supai, where most Havasupai homes and services in the canyon are clustered.
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Monday, October 28 was the first of our two full days in Havasu Canyon. We had hiked in the morning of the previous day for our three nights of camping. Despite the big hike that day, we decided for another big hike this following day: hiking downstream to Beaver Falls and then on to attempt to reach the confluence of Havasu Creek and the Colorado River in the main trunk of the Grand Canyon. From the campground, the confluence is seven miles, so it would be a long, but doable fourteen mile out-and-back. We’d decided to do it this first day because then we’d have a full day to rest before the hike back out of the canyon on Wednesday.
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