Escape Dunes

Escape Dunes is in an open grove of ponderosa pine. Escape dunes are actively moving dunes formed when sand was blown eastward across Medano Creek in dry years, piling up against the foothills. Ghost forests, (places where dunes have ...

Mosca Creek

Narrow-leaf cottonwoods are large, shady trees along riparian corridors through montane and grassland areas. Some of the largest cottonwood trees in the park have been dated at over 300 years old.

Rocks at Mosca Creek are unique and between ...

Music Pass

American pikas live primarily on the alpine tundra of Great Sand Dunes National Preserve. They spend their summers gathering mounds of grass to dry in the sun, then stay active all winter under the snowpack eating their summer's work. ...

Montville Nature Trail

The federally designated Wilderness Areas within the Park and Preserve are part of the National Wilderness Preservation System, established in 1964 with the passage of the Wilderness Act. Today, over 100 million acres across the country are protected as ...

Medano Creek

In the 1920s, local newspapers ran articles estimating there was gold in the Great Sand Dunes worth at anywhere from 17 cents/ton to $3/ton. Active placer mining operations sprang up along Medano Creek. In the 1920s the Volcanic Mining ...

National Historic Landmark- Trujillo Homestead / Zapata Ranch

After the United States annexed Mexico’s northern territories in 1848, the new American citizens of the Southwest moved north and east. One of these Hispano Americans was Teofilo Trujillo, who settled with his wife in the San Luis Valley ...

Sangre de Cristos Mountains

In 1848, John C. Fremont was hired to find a railroad route from St. Louis to California. He crossed the Sangre de Cristos into the San Luis Valley in winter, courting disaster but proving that a winter crossing of ...

San Luis Valley

The oldest evidence of humans in the area dates back about 11,000 years. Some of the first people to enter the San Luis Valley and the Great Sand Dunes area were nomadic hunters and gatherers whose connection to the ...

Star Dune

There are five dunes over 700 feet tall. The "High Dune" on the first ridge is neither the highest in elevation nor the tallest in the park, but it looks that way from the main parking lot. This is ...

Upper and Lower Dogwood Trails

Walking paths have long been a part of Hot Springs National Park and the preceding Hot Springs Reservation. Many informal paths criss-crossed the mountains when Hot Springs Reservation was reclaimed by the federal government in 1878; however, formal trails were ...