Snow at Great Sand Dunes National Park

June 25, 2022

We arrived at the Great Sand Dunes Oasis RV Park on April 3, 2022, to visit Great Sand Dunes National Park. The RV park is very close to the park and high up on a bluff that looks towards the dunes with a great view from our campsite. It was not very busy this time of year since it’s still very cold, despite being the only RV park open at the time. After getting settled, we took the jeep on the first mile and a half of the Medano Pass, a primitive road that goes through the Sangre De Cristo mountains (directly across from the dunes). We did not go through the pass but stopped at the midpoint of where it goes along the base of the dunes to get some great pictures that show the scale of them up close. After that, we went back to the Montville Nature Trail parking lot and hiked out to the dunes on foot. It was very windy, almost dusk, and expected to rain any minute so we made our hike brief before heading back before we got caught.

Overnight Snowstorm

Overnight we were surprised to wake up and find a snow storm rolled in and covered the dunes with 2-3” of snow so the entire landscape was now white. We went back and actually hiked the dunes proper from the main Dunes parking lot near the visitor center. I expected it to be muddy or difficult to hike similar to how it is on a sandy beach, but the snow layer actually made it quite nice and the sand absorbed the melt easily. There was a decent amount of people out, some with sleds which were going down some very steep dunes! We didn’t climb to the summit because it’s pretty grueling but got decently high up before making some creations out of the snow. Most of it melted off by the next day when we left.