Colorado's Great Sand Dunes

Visit North America’s Tallest Dunefield

- Steve Voynick

The American Southwest has the greatest concentration of sand dunes on the North American continent, with more than two dozen notable dunefields. Many of these are national parks and monuments, state parks, or recreational areas that are managed by the federal Bureau of Land Management. Together, they attract millions of visitors each year. None of the Southwest’s dunefields are alike. New Mexico’s White Sands National Monument is famed for its glistening, white dunes of pure gypsum, while the dunes of Utah’s Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park consist of distinctively colored, reddish sand derived from Navajo Sandstone. Some dunefields are only a few square miles in area, while California’s Algodones Dunes, the largest in the nation, cover 300 square miles.

One of the best known of these dunefields is in Colorado’s Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve. Its namesake attraction is the Great Sand Dunes—a 33-square-mile deposit of dramatically sculpted sand that is nearly devoid of vegetation. This dunefield is crowned by the continent’s tallest dune— Star Dune, which soars 755 feet from base to crest. And nestled at the base of a range of 14,000-foot-high peaks, the Great Sand Dunes are unmatched for scenic splendor. 

But the Great Sand Dunes is far more than spectacular scenery. Constantly migrating, eroding and rebuilding, these dunes are a place where geology comes alive, where legends thrive, and where plain old sand takes on a whole new perspective.