Playing In The Big Sand Box - Day 136

I dragged into Santa Fe, NM tonight. I have a throbbing heat headache caused by far too much sun. When you're in the Great Sand Dunes National Park (another NP name for exactly what it is) there isn't much shade.

This NP consists of 30 square miles of sand, and little else. As you approach the dunes from a distance, they are dwarfed by the surrounding mountains and don’t look like much. But when you are at the base and looking up, it’s pretty daunting. And once you spend a half hour slipping up the dunes, distances become a trick of the eye.

You may wonder why all the sand doesn’t just blow away, and that’s just it. It did all blow away and it blew to here. From river banks and mountain tops, sand is blown east and is caught by the baseball mitt shaped mountains that trap it. Some of it does blow down to the shoestring rivers that also encircle it and these wash the sand back out to the west, deposit it on the banks to dry out and then slowly roll it back into the pile again by the winds.

This park is just a playground and the game is to see how far you can go. Since it was a walk in the sands, I took the beach bag Mom gave me to carry water, keys and camera. The first hill teaches you just how hard it is to go up. Every step forward is reduced by slippage and the going is slow. After the first little hill about half the hikers decide that’s enough. I continued on and the next stretch was a tiring slight uphill route. You have to learn quickly how to choose a route so as to minimize the steepness. You can take any route you want, and everybody does it a bit different. But we all arrived at the steep incline...it was the only sane way up to the next plateau.

It is here that almost everybody else turns back. Probably only 5% still feel like they can make it at this point. It is only about a tenth of a mile of incline, but it is a killer. When I started, there was a woman in pink (we’ll call her Pinky) and a man in red (Red) already about half way up the hill, seated and resting. These two became my points of reference for the rest of the hike. Red took off and within about 20 minutes was at not just the top of the incline, but also streaked on to the peak. Red was my end of trek reference and Pinky was my competition.

About thirty paces up, I had to stop and sit down. Just starting below me were a couple of fit Finns that had maintained a pretty good pace, and plunged right into the slope. They made it about 10 paces past me and had to stop also. We then spent the next half hour jockeying up the hill in bursts.

Both the Finns (I have no idea their nationality, so I’m guessing) were wearing sandals and Finn1 busted his sandal during the walk so that it was unusable. The sand reaches about 140 degrees and it would be unbearable to do it in bare feet. Yet he was determined, and spent his energy doing Dudley Moore in “10” types of sprints across the sand until it got too hot and he’d slam down on his butt to get the feet off the ground. If it didn’t look so painful it would have been comical. Pinky, me and the Finns all gruelingly reached the top of the steep incline.

The whole trek up, the only reference you have as to how far away things are is the size that people look in the distance. Check out the photos of the dunes…in almost everyone there are people, it’s just that sometimes they are really teeny. Sort of a where’s waldo.

The National Parks book I consult instructed me to use hiking boots or sneakers, so I was in my New Balances. Pinky eventually congratulated me for my Good Samaritan deed that I did, giving my sweaty, stinky, sandy socks to Finn1. He thanked me considerably in some language I couldn’t understand. I just couldn’t bare to watch the pain, and he was determined to continue. Oddly, he and Finn2 eventually went all the way to the very highest point in the park. So a part of me (my socks) made it to the very top.

After the incline it was still a trek to get to Red who was waiting for Pinky and the peak, the place where the three of us decided was far enough. Pinky, Red, I and the Finns all took pictures of each other swapping cameras. I was pretty proud of myself; this was definitely the hardest 1.5 miles I will ever hike in my life.

Going up was just a slow, mesmerizing venture into as much desert as you can handle. Going down was the reward!

Red tried a head first slide down the hill and then a long roll. I opted for the 15 foot long stride leaps. At a running pace, going down the steepest parts that could not be walked up, you can cover distances in 10 seconds that would take an hour to go the other way. Having taken a different route down, I could hear Pinky and Red laughing with glee over the ridge at their fast trip down. I was giggling myself, it was like being a kid let loose on the beach for the first time. Heady stuff.

I should mention that back at the bottom I ran into a couple from Hamilton Township, NJ who were out on their own road trip. They were 3 weeks in and on this was their last big hurrah before heading home. It was fun hearing someone besides me exclaim “Wow, I haven’t seen a New Jersey license plate in 3 weeks!”

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Addendum: I uploaded two videos to the end of the Picassa web album for Day 136. The last one of Pinky and Red running down the dunes is worth a look.