A People’s History of Colorado’s Great Sand Dunes

Written by Quentin Septer

The sky was blue and boundless, and wind swept across the dunescape at twenty miles per hour. A fine mist of sand flowed across the land, and miniature transverse dunes were left in the wake of the gales. To the north, a sea of sand swelled toward a mackerel sky. To the east, Mount Herard and other high peaks of the Sangre de Cristos loomed above the dunes. To the south stood North Zapata Ridge and the southern peaks of the Sangres, shrouded in a formation of low-hanging, overcast clouds. To the west, the San Luis Valley stretched endlessly toward the San Juan Mountains. The peaks stood prominent and picturesque in the distance.

I trudged through the sand. I gained the crest of High Dune and trekked to the north. I stopped, stooped, and took a close look at a handful of sand. I saw fine white quartz grains and dark volcanic sediment hailing from the San Juan Mountains. Then, I rose and hiked on along the north-south trending ridgelines of the dunefield. Descending the slope of a steep and silky smooth mountain of sand, little avalanches flowed down the slope, coming to a stop at the dune’s base. A circus beetle, climbing toward the summit of the dune, lost its footing. It fell backwards and rolled away downslope. Across the valley, the sun arched toward the San Juans, and shadows grew long on steep, east-facing dune slopes.

On the floor of a little basin between two tall and prominent sand dunes, I made camp among blowout grass, scurfpea, and prairie sunflowers. The tracks of coyotes and jackrabbits and some species of bird unknown to me patterned the sand surrounding my tent. Sparse tufts of indian ricegrass rose from sandy earth. A peregrine falcon spun slow, graceful circles beside the sun, and cirrus clouds streaked across the sky. In any direction, I could see no signs of the century I’m living in, save the clothes on my back and my tent pitched amongst the sand.

. . .

Thirty-five million years ago, volcanoes erupted in what is now southwestern Colorado. A “large body of molten rock moved into place deep beneath the area and thrust up the high peaks of the Rocky Mountains still farther,” geologists Bruce Bryant and Peter L. Martin wrote in a report for the United States Geological Survey. “In many places this magma broke through to the surface, and volcanoes covered the terrain with vast flows of lava and ash.” Nearly a third of Colorado’s Rockies were layered by the ash flows. Today, that lava and ash has hardened to form the igneous rocks of the San Juan Mountains.

For tens of millions of years, the mountains were weathered and eroded. Southwesterly winds swept across the San Juans, carrying sediment of volcanic stone and quartz to the floor of the San Luis Valley. Rivers and streams flowed with heightening power from the newly risen ranges, too. During the Pleistocene, some two million years ago, the Rio Grande surged with glacial runoff, carrying untold volumes of sediment down into the San Luis Valley. Sediment piled some three miles thick on the valley floor. Today, we see that sediment as nothing more than the region’s soil—an intrinsic, stagnant, stable part of the landscape. It’s anything but.

Winds continued to blow. Sand swept across the floor of the San Luis Valley, toward the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Three passes in the Sangre de Cristos—Medano, Music, and Mosca Pass—form a funnel into which southwesterly winds and their cargo of sediments flow. Here, the southwesterlies are met with south-east blowing winds. Airborne sand swirls and settles on the valley floor. A body of water known as Lake Alamosa once flanked the Sangre de Cristos, at the site of today’s Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve. But as wind continued to funnel into the region, and sediment continued to accumulate on the floor of Lake Alamosa, sand dunes rose from the lake’s surface, like a lotus flower.

Lake Alamosa disappeared about 440,000 years ago. The lake was drowned in sand, so to speak. Shortly thereafter—in geologic time, that is—the climate began to change. “Dramatic natural climate change,” in the words of the National Park Service, led to the drying of still other lakes on the floor of the San Luis Valley. The sand left in the wake of these lakes, too, was blown toward the Sangre de Cristos. For hundreds of thousands of years, sand heaped upon the playa of Lake Alamosa, giving form to Colorado’s Great Sand Dunes as they exist today.

And today, the San Luis Valley is a desert. But back in the days of Lake Alamosa, during the Pleistocene, the valley was a mosaic landscape of interconnected lakes, marshes, wetlands, and grasslands. Moisture left behind by melting glaciers provided sustenance for a diversity of plant life, and that vegetation attracted herds of big game to the area—wooly mammoths and a giant, extinct species of buffalo known as Bison antiquus, among them.

Human beings followed the herds into the San Luis Valley. Archeologists have discovered spear points near the Great Sand Dunes. The points are 11,000 years old. They are two-faced spear heads. An archeologist would say that they are “bifacially chipped.” They have “slightly convex sides, a concave base, and flake-removal scars on one or both faces, which extend from the base to about a third of the way to the tip,” in the words of Micheal J. O’brien and Briggs Buchanan, writing in the journal of Evolutionary Anthropology in 2017. The flake-removal scars stylizing the spear points are the result of their “fluting,” a process by which flakes are chipped from the point to increase its strength and durability upon impacting mammoth and bison bones. Dozens such points have been unearthed in the San Luis Valley. Early inhabitants used atlatls to lob the points, attached to the head of a spear, into the flesh of large game. They are known to history as “Clovis points.”

The Clovis peoples were among the earliest inhabitants of North America. For a long time, the Clovis people were deemed the earliest inhabitants of the continent. However, recent findings in the field of archeology have since overturned the “Clovis First Hypothesis,” as the idea has become known. Human footprints embedded in exposed rock outcrops of Lake Otero in New Mexico’s White Sands National Park were recently dated at 21,000 to 23,000 years of age. The findings were published in Science. Other, older findings suggest that people lived in Monte Verde Chile as long as 18,000 years ago. And a set of hammerstones and stone anvils in southern California, which appear to have been built by hominids, suggests that people—or a hominid ancestor of ours—may have inhabited the continental United States as long as 130,000 years ago.

In any case, the Clovis people are the first peoples from whom archeological evidence exists in the San Luis Valley. They were a nomadic people. They hunted game and gathered plants, and migrated to and from the region with their prey. They wore animal skins, and made cloth from the feathers of game birds and the fur of rabbits and other small game. And they left Clovis points and ivory rods and large, prismatic stone blades in their wake, embedded in the strata of the San Luis Valley.

Following in the footsteps of the Clovis culture were the Folsom peoples. The Folsom culture first appeared in the San Luis Valley around 10,500 years ago. Their habitation of the region is marked by the presence of “Folsom points.” They differ from the points of the Clovis peoples in that the fluting of Folsom points extend along the entire length of the spear head. They are a shorter, more slender point. Several Folsom sites have been discovered in the San Luis Valley, in the area neighboring the Great Sand Dunes. Notably, there is the Linger site, where 22 Folsom stone artifacts were documented by archeologists C. T. Hurst, Gene Sutherland, and Al Pearsall back in 1941, along with the bones of another extinct bison species called Bison taylori. And there’s the Zapata site, where another six Folsom points and more bison bones were discovered some years later.

Not much is known of the Clovis or Folsom cultures, however. Less still is known about the Clovis and Folsom peoples to travel through the San Luis Valley, in particular. They left no written records behind. The best we can do is piece together a snapshot of their lives with an analysis of their artifacts. 

After the Folsom culture came the Yuma people. Like the Clovis and Folsom peoples, the Yuma migrated to and from the region with the change of the seasons and the migration of their game. And like their predecessors, little is known about the Yuma culture. The Yuma people left the area rather promptly, however, as evidenced by the lack of archeological evidence that they left behind. 

Then, people stopped coming to the San Luis Valley and the Great Sand Dunes altogether.

Around 8,000 B.C., the region experienced another period of “dramatic natural climate change.” The end of the last Ice Age was marked by the melting of the region’s glaciers. Glacial runoff pooled in lakes, ponds, wetlands, and marshes scattered about the floor of the San Luis Valley. And when the glaciers melted, and melted for good, the landscape grew inhospitably dry. Moisture evaporated into the thin air of the high country. Plants struggled to put down roots and draw water. The region became the desert that it is today. Herds of big game left the area, and people with them.

It wasn’t until about 5,000 B.C. that the climate shifted in a more hospitable manner. Plants could once again grow in the area, and herds of antelope, bison, deer, elk, and other game wandered back into the San Luis Valley. Following in their footsteps were human beings. With them, they brought new artifacts. Spear points made of basalt and obsidian started appearing on the landscape around this time. The points were chiseled from the volcanic stone of the San Juan Mountains. An anthropologist by the name of Etienne B. Renaud deemed them “Rio Grande Points,” a defining feature of this new culture on the scene.

About 2,000 years ago, the Anasazi culture emerged to the south of Colorado’s Great Sand Dunes. Anasazi is a Navajo word, meaning “The Old Ones.” The Anasazi are ancestors of the Navajo people. They wove beautiful baskets and made pottery, and lived in rectangular pit houses. They raised corn, beans, and squash, and they built subterranean ceremonial structures called kiva. The Anasazi were succeeded by the Pueblo cultures of the American Southwest. They traveled north into the San Luis Valley and the area adjoining the Great Sand Dunes to hunt, but they made no attempts to permanently settle the area. Among Tewa-speaking Pueblo cultures along the Rio Grande, the Great Sand Dunes were known as sip’ophe—the place from which their ancestors emerged into the world.

Meanwhile, Athapaskan-speaking Navajo and Apache peoples traveled to the region from the north. They brought with them bows and arrows. They left behind stone arrowheads and the bones of deer, antelope, and other, smaller game. Among the Jicarilla Apache, the dunes are called Sei-anyedi. In English, the word translates, loosely, to the following sentence: “It goes up and down.” Presumably, the Jicarilla Apache were referring to the way in which sand flows across the dunefield. 

Then came Shoshonian-speaking peoples from the Great Basin of the American West. These people were ancestors of the Hopi, Piutes, Shoshone, and Utes. 

Indigenous cultures continued to branch off, and new societies emerged. 

The Utes, for example, fragmented into seven main bands—the Capote, Grand River (otherwise known as the “White River” band), Muache, Tabeguache (later known as the Uncompaghre band), Uintah, Weeminuche, and the Yampa. Several Ute bands frequented the San Luis Valley and the Great Sand Dunes area. At the time of their arrival in the valley, the Utes didn’t yet have horses. They’d yet to acquire them from Spanish settlers steadily encroaching on the region. The Utes summered in the San Luis Valley. Come winter, they traveled over Cochetopa Pass, seeking refuge from the cold in the Uncompahgre and Gunnison valleys. At the time, plains tribes—Arapaho, Cheyenne, Comanches, Kiowa, Sioux, and Pawnee—migrated to the region to hunt in the summer months. Battles occasionally broke out between rival tribes. 

“These were the conditions the Spanish found when they first entered the area between 1630 and 1640,” Dorothy D. Wilson wrote in a guidebook for the New Mexico Geological Society. She wrote those words in 1971. Since then, evidence has emerged suggesting that Spanish explorers entered the region even earlier. Jaun de Zaldair and his brother Vincent, for example, may have passed through the San Luis Valley as early as 1598. In any case, the Spanish began trading with the Utes upon their arrival in the area, and relations were initially peaceful. Soon, however, violence broke out. In 1637, Governor Luis de Rosas declared war on the Ute people. 

The Spanish established settlements in the San Luis Valley.

Conflict continued in the years, decades, and centuries to come.

. . .

Late in the year of 1806, a 27-year-old United States Army Lieutenant by the name of Zebulon Pike led an expedition to Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. Commissioned to explore the region in search of the headwaters of the Arkansas River, Pike led his men and mules over the Sangre de Cristos and down the western slope of Mosca Pass in the dead of winter. Half starved and severely frostbitten after weeks of frigid travel, Lt. Pike penned the world’s earliest written words describing Colorado’s Great Sand Dunes in the pages of his journal, dated January 28th, 1807:

“After marching some miles, we discovered…at the foot of the White Mountains [known today as the Sangre de Cristos] which we were then descending, sandy hills…When we encamped, I ascended one of the largest hills of sand, and with my glass could discover a large river [the Rio Grande]…The sand-hills extended up and down the foot of the White Mountains about 15 miles, and appeared to be about 5 miles in width. Their appearance was exactly that of the sea in a storm, except as to color, not the least sign of vegetation existing thereon.”

I traveled to Colorado’s Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve in late October of 2021. The first thing I did upon my arrival was hike Mosca Pass, following in the footsteps of Zebulon Pike. And Zebulon Pike, it should be said, followed in the footsteps of the region’s indigenous people. Native peoples—from the Clovis and Folsom cultures to the Utes, Apaches, Navajo and so on—established many of the passes into and out of the San Luis Valley. The Spanish followed in their footsteps when they entered the region. There was Wolf Creek Pass to the southwest, and Cochetopa Pass to the west. There was Poncha Pass to the north. And to the east, just above the Great Sand Dunes themselves, there was Mosca Pass.

Ascending the pass, I trekked among piñon and juniper, prickly pear and mountain alders growing along the banks of Mosca Creek. There were yucca and currants, ponderosa and white pine, and Douglas fir that grew on shaded, north-facing slopes along the stream banks. There were narrowleaf cottonwoods down along the creek, too, their leaves grown golden and orange in the late days of October. The leaves quaked and rustled in the wind. Some trees had dropped their leaves altogether, preparing for the winter months ahead. Birds sang from their perches, and overhead, a crow emoted an ominous squawk.

Rock and soil crunched beneath my feet, and my footsteps brought me to the apex of Mosca Pass. This very place has served as a crossroads in the human history of the Great Sand Dunes and the greater San Luis Valley. A few decades after Zebulon Pike and his men made their foray over Mosca Pass, John Charles Frémont and his ill-fated fourth expedition followed suit in 1848. The men went on to meet a disastrous end in the San Juans, in search of a railroad route bridging the mineral-rich lands of the American West with cities and industries on the East Coast. Then came Captain John Williams Gunnison and his expedition in 1853. They, too, were in search of a mid-latitude railway route. They traveled over Mosca Pass, sauntered down along the southern edge of the Great Sand Dunes, and continued on to the west. On the morning of October 26, 1853, Gunnison and seven of his men were killed by a band of Utes near the present-day site of the Gunnison Bend Reservoir. 

Not long after Captain Gunnison and his men wandered into the area, tensions between Utes and Euro-American settlers began to boil over. In 1866, the body of a Ute boy was discovered near Fort Garland in the San Luis Valley, a few miles south of the Great Sand Dunes. He’d been murdered by white settlers. Then, the son of Chief Kaniache, chief of the Muache Utes, was killed by Mexican sheepherders near Cimarron, New Mexico. Kaniache retaliated with an uprising, leading raiding parties against frontier communities throughout the San Luis Valley. One U.S. soldier was killed. Hostages were captured. Kaniache intended to wage full-on war against the whites. He invited Chief Ouray of the Tabeguache Utes to join the fight. Instead, Ouray warned homesteaders in the San Luis Valley of hostile Ute bands soon to pass through the area. Some reports from the time claim that Ouray himself forced Kanianche to surrender after killing one of his Muache Ute sub-chiefs. Others say that Shavano, the revered Tabeguache war chief, captured Kanianche and subdued him. Still others state that Kanianche simply turned himself and his hostages into Chief Ouray’s custody.

Whatever the true story may be, settlers in the San Luis Valley were left shaken by the “Muache Outbreak.” Newspapers wrote unscrupulously of hostile Utes in the area. “The Indians,” The Rocky Mountain News reported on August 22, 1866, “are now engaged in an indiscriminate massacre of all the Mexican inhabitants they can find.” Euro-American settlers spoke of the Utes in hushed tones. Across the San Luis Valley and the Colorado Territory at large, there were murmurings of war. 

In 1874, for example, when the U.S. Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories entered the San Luis Valley—led by Ferdinand V. Hayden of the University of Pennsylvania—Hayden requested extra troops to defend the expedition from hostile Ute bands. With Hayden was the acclaimed landscape photographer William Henry Jackson. He captured the world’s first photographs of Colorado’s Great Sand Dunes, from a vantage point not far from the present-day site of the national park’s visitor center. The images provided the American public with an early glimpse of the natural splendor to be found in the American West. In addition to snapping photos, the expedition made maps, named landmarks, and made detailed studies of the region’s flora, fauna, and strata. 

They made geologic maps, too. Those maps attracted the attention of miners and prospectors. Those miners and prospectors and other Euro-American settlers began encroaching on what were, by both law and ethics, Ute lands. Frontier folk of the time demanded that the Utes be removed from the area. The Conejos Treaty, the Kit Carson Treaty, and several other treaties with the Ute people were broken by the Federal Government. 

By 1880, the Utes were forced onto reservations in Utah, and gold was unearthed in the San Luis Valley. 

. . .

I trek east, along the southern flank of the Great Sand Dunes and on along the banks of Medano Creek. The creek is more of a sandbar at this time of year, in late October. Willows and rabbitbrush grow along the banks, among cottonwoods and box elders. Hiking up a dry and sandy stream bed, I stumble upon the flows of Medano Creek. The creek runs in braided streams that confluence and carry sediment downstream in long, arching fingers, the longest of which is shaped like the state of Florida. The streams coalesce and culminate in miniature barriers of sand surrounded by foamy, cloudy water, where the water stops flowing.

Upstream, Mount Herard looms high against an overcast sky. The summit of the peak is talus and silver in coloration. Other peaks of the Sangre de Cristos enclose the Sand Dunes in a half circle. White pines and Douglas and subalpine fir grow on their slopes, among piñon, aspen, and juniper. On nearer slopes grow ponderosa pine. Just south of Medano Creek and a brief hike up the hillside is the Indian Grove—a stand of 200 ponderosas. The amber-colored, scale-like bark of the pines has been peeled from 72 trees in the Indian Grove. The trees were peeled by Utes, Apaches, and other indigenous peoples of the region back in the 1800s. They peeled the bark for culinary and medicinal purposes. Wind rustles the leaves of cottonwoods along the banks of the creek, and bear tracks meander in the mud. 

A diversity of wildlife inhabits Colorado’s Great Sand Dunes. There are elk and mule deer that drink from the banks of Medano Creek, and Rio Grande Suckers that swim in the stream. There are black bear and mountain lions that leave tracks in the sand, among badgers and a miniature species of short-horned lizard, and tiger salamanders that freeze in the winter, and thaw and come back to life when the weather warms. There are chorus frogs that sing in the spring, and bison and pronghorn antelope that graze in grasslands flanking the park. There are 250 species of birds known to inhabit the region. There are bald eagles and brown-capped rosy finches, mountain bluebirds and red-breasted nuthatches, Rufous and Calliope hummingbirds, and sandhill cranes that migrate to and from the park and preserve by the thousands. There are seven species of insect endemic to Colorado’s Great Sand Dunes. That is to say, these species are found nowhere else on the planet. There are clown and circus beetles, noctuid moths and robber flies. There are Werner’s Ant-like Flower Beetles, and Triplehorn’s Ant-like Flower Beetles. And there’s the Great Sand Dunes Tiger Beetle. The beetle has a bright green head and a coffee and crème-colored, tiger-like pattern on the backside of its thorax. It lives among blowout grass and scurf pea, and preys upon ants and mites and other, smaller beetle species.

I follow bear tracks up the creek, where boulders lay amassed in the streambed, colored green, orange, and yellow by crusts and constellations of lichen and moss. The boulders were broken off from the Sangre de Cristos and carried with the flow of snowmelt in the spring and early summer months, when the water runs high. 

Medano Creek flows just south of the Great Sand Dunes. This stream, along with the nearby Sand Creek, carries dune sand down to the floor of the San Luis Valley, where southwesterly winds blow the sand back toward the dunefield. In this manner, the sand is recycled, and the Great Sand Dunes have remained remarkably stable over time. Modern photographers have recaptured William Henry Jackson’s pictures of the area. The photos, taken more than 150 years apart, show that the dunes have retained their general structure over time.

In the years and decades after William Henry Jackson snapped his photos of Colorado’s Great Sand Dunes, prospectors began staking claims in the Sangre de Cristos. Placer mines sprang up along Medano Creek, and speculation arose that gold could be mined from the Great Sand Dunes themselves. Local newspapers ran editorials advertising gold deposits yielding 17 cents to three dollars per ton. That was big money in those days, in the early 1930s. And it was around then that the Volcanic Mining Company constructed a gold mill along the banks of Medano Creek, on the southern edge of the main dunefield. Trace amounts of gold can be found in the Great Sand Dunes, but the precious metal occurs in such miniscule quantities that gold mining operations in the area proved futile. The ruins of the Volcanic Mining Company’s old mill remain on the grounds of the Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve to this day. Not much remains of the operation, however, but a rusted metal smelter and segments of piping enclosed by a weathered wall of concrete. 

The Volcanic Mining Company’s efforts to extract gold from the Great Sand Dunes were unsuccessful, but residents of the San Luis Valley were alarmed by attempts to “develop” the region. Millicent Velhagen, a poet, political lobbyist, and member of the Monte Vista and Alamosa chapters of The P.E.O. Sisterhood—an organization working to provide educational and professional opportunities to young women—began writing to local, state, and federal politicians. She espoused the beauty and splendor of the Great Sand Dunes region, and encouraged fellow members of The P.E.O. Sisterhood to do the same. Mrs. Valhagen “has been active in the campaign to have the dunes proclaimed as a national monument,” an article from a since defunct publication entitled The Walsenburg World reads, dated March 19, 1932. Just two days earlier, on March 17, 1932, President Herbert Hoover designated the Great Sand Dunes National Monument, the 36th national monument in the U.S. National Park System.

President Harry S. Truman expanded the monument’s boundaries in 1946. So, too, did President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in 1956. On October 20, 1976, Congress designated the Great Sand Dunes Wilderness—a wilderness area comprising the main dunefield, along with the high-alpine, montane, and saltwood-greasebrush ecosystems encircling the dunes. Notions of wilderness and National Monument status did little to deter developers, however. “Developers,” a report from the National Park Service’s Geologic Resource Division states, “spurred by the abundant groundwater beneath the monument, designed 13,000 houses to be built along or near the monument’s edge.” In 1991, American Water Development Incorporated applied for rights to divert an annual 200,000 acre-feet of ground water from aquifers in the San Luis Valley to Denver and other cities on the Front Range. The proposal would have lowered the water table along the boundary of the Great Sand Dunes National Monument an estimated 150 feet.

The proposal prompted scientists from the National Park Service and other federal agencies to conduct research on the hydrological systems underlying the Great Sand Dunes National Monument. They carried out studies on 21 groundwater monitoring wells in the area. They found that seasonal fluctuations in the region’s water table vary significantly with the change of the seasons. In the words of the National Park Service: “Results from the research predicted that any significant lowering of the water table would increase the gradient between the streams and groundwater and decrease the extent and volume of flow, the ability for surge flow to develop, and the ability of these streams to transport sand. If the creeks cannot transport sand back to the upwind side of the dune field, the long-term viability of the dune field will be jeopardized.”

“Water is the lifeblood of the Great Sand Dunes,” the report from the National Park Service’s Geologic Resource Division continues. “Without water, creeks would no longer flow across the sand, the dunes and the sand deposits around them would change, and wetlands and ponds that support a rich diversity of life would dry up.”

On these grounds, American Water Development Incorporated’s proposition to sell the San Luis Valley’s water for profit was rejected in 1991. Similar attempts were made by Stockman’s Water Company in 1995. Those proposals, too, were turned down. A year later, officials from Challenger Gold Incorporated (which has since been rechristened “Lexam Explorations”) were looking for gold on the Baca land grant, just west of the Great Sand Dunes National Monument. They didn’t find gold, but they found oil. They began digging in search of profitable wells, but found none. Later attempts were made to lease oil and gas development rights on Baca Ranch, just west of the dunefield, but the region’s oil reserves proved unprofitable.

Nonetheless, attempts to develop the area inspired stirrings of conservation among local residents. In 1999, The Nature Conservancy purchased the Medano-Zapata Ranch—just south and west of the Great Sand Dunes National Monument—with the intent of preserving the land. Locals began lobbying for the region’s protection, just as Millicent Velhagen did in the early 1930s. 

Because of the elemental relationship between water and sand, the National Park Service’s Geologic Resource Division states, “Congress passed the Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve Act, which authorized the creation of a national park and a national preserve that includes the entire hydrological system of the dunes, from tundra to wetlands.” President Bill Clinton signed the act on November 22, 2000. Today’s Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve occupies an area of about 232 square miles. From the high alpine tundra of the Sangre de Cristos, just above the dunes, to the forests and montane meadows on the range’s lower slopes, to the streams of Medano and Sand Creek and their tributaries, to the saltbrush-greasewood ecosystems, wetlands, marshes and grasslands surrounding the Great Sand Dunes themselves—all is protected as federally-recognized wilderness.

And with respect to mining and development in the region, the National Park Service’s Geologic Resources Division “has concluded that the possibility of a commercial oil and gas discovery in the park is unlikely and highly speculative.” Any future oil and gas claims would be regulated by the National Park Service’s Non-Federal Oil and Gas Rights regulations. 

For now and for the foreseeable future, it seems, Colorado’s Great Sand Dunes are safely preserved, free from threats of development.

. . .

Beyond the ruins of the Volcanic Mining Company’s old gold mill, the Great Sand Dunes sail high and golden against an evening sky. The sun arches across the San Luis Valley and hovers above the San Juan Mountains. Sand flows across the landscape, blown by southwesterly winds. Before me, a steady stream of tourists flow to and from the park’s main dunefield. Men and women, children and senior citizens; all saunter across the landscape with a look of wonder on their faces.

“Look at this!” a fellow traveler remarks. “I’ve never seen anything like this!”

His friends walk on, toward the dunefield. He stops and spins a full circle, admiring the million beautiful vistas stretching from skyline to skyline. He wears camouflage pants, a green and blue flannel, aviator sunglasses and a blue, flat-billed hat that reads: “PROTECT OUR PARKS.” Nearly completing his rotation, and his admiration of the scenery, the lenses of his shades meet my eyes. 

I smile and nod.

“Isn’t this place amazing?” he asks.

“Absolutely,” I affirm. 

And I thought of the Clovis people. They must have shared the sentiment, all those years ago, when they wandered into the San Luis Valley and first laid eyes on the Great Sand Dunes.