Christmas Colorado Road Trip Part II
Road Trip Stop #3 - Great Sand Dunes National Park
After spending the last few days in pique winter wonderland, we suddenly found ourselves in the desert hiking up a 700 foot sand dune. All in a day’s work, right?
Where are my 14,000 foot snow capped mountains and beautiful snowy pine trees?
Scattered throughout the whole lotta nothing that is this area of Colorado, there were people living in tiny houses and RVs in the middle of the desert featuring Ian’s beard that I was too lazy to crop out of the photo.
Sand dunes ahead!
Good morning, mule deer.
Here we go! Not featured - high winds (National Weather Service high wind alert high) and freezing temps :)
Oh yeah, and there are mountains behind the sand dunes.
This was honestly one of the coolest parts of the trip. It was just so different from anything else we were doing. Who else can say they’ve bear crawled up a giant sand dune in the middle of winter?
The wind blew our footprints away in no time after this photo.
Okay, okay, I know that was A LOT of sand content, but it was such a cool park and arguably the most unique part of the trip.
Road Trip Stop #4 - Durango, CO & Mesa Verde National Park
After spending the day in the desert, we headed west in yet another snowstorm to Durango, CO.
There’s a mountain back there somewhere.
We finally made it to our fourth Best Western of the trip in Durango.
In Durango, we cross country skied, ate a ton of good food, and visited Mesa Verde National Park. Durango is neat because it has more red rocks like southern Utah but they’re covered in pine trees and snow. There’s also a train that runs through the middle of town, which was the constant soundtrack to this part of the trip.
Now we head to Mesa Verde National Park, which was really cool because it had ancient cliff dwellings from Pueblans who lived there over 1,000 years ago. A lot of the park was closed because of snow (one day it was closed completely due to a blizzard), but we still found a few things to explore. It was great to have not only the beautiful scenery but the historical and cultural elements to see as well.
People used to live in there. It’s a whole tiny town in a cliff.
Petroglyphs are awesome.
Same cliff dwelling but from a slightly different angle because I think it’s cool.
Naturally, we drove through yet another snowstorm on our way back to Pootah only to come home to rain and yet another snowstorm to the tune of about a foot of snow. I love the winter wonderland vibes, but I definitely love it more when I don’t have to drive in it.
Here’s a photo of one of the most delicious breakfast ever at this little French bakery in Durango.
That’s all I’ve got for our Colorado Christmas road trip recap. We had such a fine time skiing, snowshoeing, eating, and even driving through snowstorms.
I’ll do another post about our Zion trip from Thanksgiving soon, but for today I’m all blogged out. I hope you enjoyed the posts and that you had a happy holiday season.
Love and miss you all!
Until next time,
Chloe
