I just looked at when I wrote about Day 3 of our trip. At this pace it will take me 3 more weeks to finish the story. I need to speed this up. There are more stories to tell after this.

As told in the last post, we found a road on USFS land and pulled off to the side to park. It was dark by then so we could only see what the headlights of the truck showed. Looking back now at the GPS data on my photos I see we were not too far east of Mancos on the San Juan National Forest. In the morning we got on the road and headed east on Hwy. 160.

We drove through beautiful country heading northeast from Pagosa Springs towards Wolf Creek Pass. The scenery was markedly greener than during the previous days.

The old green truck that is used to living at 30′ elevation wasn’t happy about the climb to 10,000+ elevation.

Standing with one foot on each side of the Continental Divide.

From the pass it was about two hours to Great Sand Dunes National Park.

After spending some time in the Visitor Center and learning about how these dunes were created we walked to the dunes.

This is another place that I could come back to.

You could spend a whole day exploring this landscape. There are 30 square miles of dunes! There are no trails through them but you can walk anywhere.

This is a panoramic shot of the closest dune field and shows the mountains at over 13,000′ where you can find alpine lakes if you’re willing to hike. Most of the park is not accessible by vehicle.

There were plenty of wildflowers on the surrounding land. Prairie Sunflower.