Day 37

Day 37 - Tuesday July 28th, 2009

Great Sand Dunes National Park, CO to Mesa Verde National Park, CO

We packed up the campsite and headed to the Office/Restaurant for some coffee and opted to stay for breakfast after perusing the menu. Satiated, we reentered the park and drove to the dunes parking lot. Tara stayed behind in the car and I set off into the dunes.

Imagine the deepest, driest, softest beach sand that you have ever walked upon. Now place that nice beach at 8800 feet and you get an idea for how difficult the 1/4 mile walk to the first small dune was.

I could see people at the top of the highest visible dune and figured they started their adventure at 7 am and not 10 am. I turned back and trudged to the car making tracks in the virgin sand.

The drive west was non-eventful, stopping only for fuel, Sonic, and a car wash. With clouds building and the wind starting to whip we reached the Morefield Campground in Mesa Verde National Park, CO. This is possibly the largest campground in the National Park system with over 400 sites, laundry services, and showers. We found a site that we liked, went to the office to the office to pay before setting up, learned that we were suppose to pay first then find a site, returned to discover that 'our' site had suddenly become occupied, and settled on a serviceable, if a little sloped site at the end of the Navajo Loop. We battled the wind to get the tent up before the rain came and decided to do one last round of laundry on the road.

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