2002 08 13 Great Sand Dunes NP, San Luis Valley CO
I spent all of today either at the Great Sand Dunes or out looking around in the (very large and very flat) San Luis Valley.
The morning was a bust photographically speaking. I got up at 5:30 and had hiked out to be where I wanted to be by 6:45 or so. (Sunrise here is about 6:20, but the sun does not come up over the Sangre de Cristo mountains to the east until about 7:00. Nice gory name for those mountains, eh? The "Blood of Christ" mountains. Those Spaniards could pick em..) Anyway, I am out there, and all we have overhead are nice high gray clouds. Not completely overcast, but enough to kill the light and make the whole thing a washout. I wandered around perhaps thinking that the clouds might vaporize, but that did not happen.. did not shoot a frame. But I did take a few snaps. This is more or less what the dunes look like at that hour:
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So after all that I trudged off the dunes and hoped the rest of the day would be better, and that the clouds would go away.. which they more or less did. I should also mention it was cold and very windy this morning. I think the low was about 35, and the wind was going 15-25 MPH most of the time I was out there. My hands froze..
In most years Medano Creek flows down along the east side of the dunes, from north to south. It comes out of the mountains and moves sand south and it is blown back up onto the dunes by the prevailing SW winds. Up until now I had never been here when there was not either a lot or some water in the creek. Usually fast moving and always very cold. This year nothing.. this is looking north.
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And this is looking south:
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The dune field is really large though. It's not the creek that keeps it in place, it is the wind. The dune field is several miles each way and is held against the mountains by the prevailing SW winds. The mountains are high enough (several 14000+ peaks) that the wind cannot lift the sand over them. It all gets dropped and stays in place.
After the trip out in the morning I just drove around to look at new places and places I had already been to. I think I mentioned before that the valley is mostly sage, cattle, and potatoes. I should add that some sort of grain is grown in places too.. I don't know what the grain is..
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Lots of water goes into that, and this, which is potatoes. The green stuff, that is.
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I found an abandoned drive in to shoot, which was sort of cool. It looks like the last movie shown there was in the era of soda cans with the poptops that came off. They were everywhere.
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There is also a motel near Monte Vista that is a weird hybrid of a motel and a drive in. The motel is shaped in a shallow U and is at the back of a conventional (and operating) drive in. I guess things at the Monte Vista drive in must get hot and frothy often enough that the call "Get a room!" has to have some meaning!
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One more coment about Monte Vista. It's a small town (2000 people?) about 12-14 miles from Alamosa, which is 2-3 times that size. It looks not to different from the way it must have looked in the 30s and 40s. It even has a Carnegie Library. Andrew Carnegie gave away a lot of money building libraries all over the country in small towns. This was sometime in very early 1900s. They are usually the most impressive building in town. So, Monte Vista has a fairly "alive" downtown, at least for a small rural town. Downtown Alamosa, however, is struggling. I think this is because Alamosa has been "Wal-Marted". Wal Mart built a SuperColossalMegaStore on the highway out of town, and it is now surrounded by a mile or two of fast food places, other stores, and strip malls. All the serious commercial dollars change hands out there, and not downtown. It's an interesting contrast.
Anyway, I did quite a lot of driving around and shot a lot of film of various things this afternoon. The clouds gave me a break and it got a lot warmer, although it was windy all day. I went back out on the dunes for sunset, which was quite nice. Ran into a number of these guys, who have incredibly sharp vision. I tossed a tiny piece of cracker out the car window and this guy immediately flew in from about 100 yards away. A magpie of some kind, I think.
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He's a little blurry looking because the wind was really moving him around.
The dunes were pretty windy too. This is looking east.
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I am not normally a sunset kind of guy, but the sunset today was quite nice:
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This is not the best shot of it, but it was quite nice. Very red and orange with a turquoise sky behind it.
I also tried to make contact with the manager of the Medano-Zapata ranch, which was bought by the Nature Conservancy not too long ago. The Zapata ranch was a commercial bison ranch as well as a golf resort and inn. The Nature Conservancy is letting the golf course "revert" but will continue to manage the bison herd. Some of the large tract of land making up the ranch will go over to the National Monument, as will some of the land from the Baca Ranch, which they also bought, and which is north of the dunes. I want to get in touch with the ranch manager so he can get me access to the northwest side of the dunes. To do that now I would have to go through a lot of locked Nature Conservancy gates and do a lot of trespassing. I tried to find a way to that side of the dunes several times before, back before the Nature Conservancy bought the land, and it was all locked. Interesting walking around the reverting golf course. You can still find tees in all the high grass and occasional bison turds.
Tomorrow I am going to be out at dawn again ..
P.S., and FYI .. These pics are not indicative of what I was taking for myself. These are just visual notes of where I was... It's good for me to have these notes.. I wish I had been doing it 10 and 15 and 20 years ago ..