When I woke up on Friday, there were hummingbirds outside my window. The ranch house had half a dozen feeders and there were groups of hummingbirds crowding around to get at the sugar water. That’s when I remembered that I wasn’t in the city any more. Murph and I packed up our gear and headed out to a point of geologic interest a short drive down the road from the ranch house. Along that very road, Edward Drinker Cope and Otheniel C. Marsh had excavated some of the most well known dinosaurs more than a hundred years before. As we drove along, we resolved that we should do no more driving in the dark if we can help it since the scenery we’d missed on the way in was amazing. We arrived at the Marsh quarry and checked out the ancient creek bed that had yielded 250 crates worth of dinosaur bones, all of which were packed out by mule teams all the way to the railroad and shipped overland back to the museums of the East Coast. The quarry is pictured below. Note the awesome paleochannel features! Sweet!
After our first short hike at altitude, we headed back to the house for a quick bite to eat before meeting up with the field school folks for our trip down to Great Sand Dunes. We left around 1 PM, following the field school vans out of Cañon City. The drive down to the park went through some really impressive canyons along US 50 between Cañon City and Salida that were full of rafters taking advantage of the large amount of runoff that was making for some excellent rapids. Turning south onto US 285, we entered the large San Luis Valley. We could see the dunes clearly ahead of us. We didn’t know that they were still some 40 miles distant along the base of the Sangre de Cristo Range. It was almost an hour later that we actually pulled in to Great Sand Dunes National Park. By then it was around 4 PM and we wanted to get some dune climbing in before the day was out. We bid adieu to the field school at their campsite in the park and promised to return after getting our dune-climbing fix.
We wanted to tackle the highest dune in the group closest to the visitor’s center, a pile of sand more than 650 ft high. This was the same dune that I had failed to climb with my family when we visited the park in 1993. Of course, I was 13 and my youngest brother was 8, so Murph and I were a little better suited to the task this time around. Even so, hiking through sand is tough going and we were just over halfway up the dune after twenty-five minutes of brisk walking. We stuck to the ridges for the most part, except for one dash up a slip face, and the wind got steadily stronger as we ascended. We slowed down as we got near the top, but managed to reach the summit an hour after we started. The view from the top was breathtaking, stretching out over the miles of sand dunes to the north and reaching all the way across the valley to the Lagarita Mountains in the west. Our descent was much easier than the climb up. Running at top speed down a sand dune is an invigorating and stupid way to cover a lot of ground very quickly. Murph wasn’t having any of it, which was good because it gave me a chance to catch my breath between sprints. Though there were a few times when my body seemed ready to outpace my legs and send me face first into the sand, I managed to make it the whole way down without embarrassing myself. Even with our frequent stops, we made it down the dunes in twenty-five minutes. 
Tired and sandy, we headed to the field camp campsite where there was beer, dinner and a roaring fire. We still had no idea where we were going to stay that night and we knew we wanted to make it to Mesa Verde the next day. We just figured we’d play it by ear when Untenured offered to let us stay at his place in Alamosa, a half hour away from the campsite. We said our goodbyes to Kansanography and the rest of the field crew and headed to Alamosa, following Untenured and his wife Cogito into the unlit darkness separating the National Park from the town. This was already going against our no-dark-driving resolution, but it was just a quick jaunt through the rather uninteresting valley anyway. Nevertheless, thanks to the utter pitch-black dark of the rural road, Murph managed to (most likely) run over a chipmunk and we saw Cogito hit a rabbit right in front of us. We decided not to tell her about the rabbit. Upon arrival at the house, however, Cogito expressed her dismay at accidentally killing a helpless bunny. We admitted witnessing the whole thing. The only real way to cure a wildlife-murdering malaise is with wine. Thankfully, we had brought a large bottle. Untenured actually hadn’t seen his house until that very moment. He and Cogito had bought it weeks ago and he’d been off with field school the whole time while she’d been painting and moving in. So he was as eager as we were to check out the new digs. We slowly but surely demolished the wine while offering decorating advice. Despite the fact that I had just met these people, they seemed more than happy to accept my interior design suggestions. I have no idea why. Once we were completely tired out, Murph and I retired to the “green room,” named for its newly-acquired paint, and quickly fell asleep, resolving to make it an early day to get out to Mesa Verde with daylight to spare.
Day’s Score:
Drinks: 8? Maybe more.
Miles: 150
Maximum Elevation: 8,500 ft.
Parks: 1
Roadkills: 2 (1 chipmunk, 1 rabbit)
0 comments:
Post a Comment