Captain’s Log May 20th only a few hour until apparently the world will end

Day 8: the Great Sand Dunes

We left Colorado Springs at the crack of dawn to get to the duns as fast as possible. Finally the weather had cleared and it looked like it was going to be a perfect day. I had the early driving shift, as I have a tendency to be wide awake at 6 am, the drive out of Colorado Springs was truly something else. Places like this makes me wonder why the heck have I chosen to live in places like Houston and Atlanta when there are places like this still here in the US. Driving through this country side makes going a max speed of 55 mph not bad. You can really soak in the beautiful, you can contemplate God’s majesty, you can jam to the blue grass playing on the stereo and be completely content and in awe of life. So good.

Back in Illinois, however long ago that was, we had found a small rip in the side of the front right tire. We had been keeping an eye on it, and it had only been getting bigger. We decided that we should get that fixed today, before we try and drive to Utah. So we had called around and found a truck stop in Walsonburg CO on the way to the Great Sand Dunes that apparently had a used tire for us. The truck stop was in a small poe-dunk little town at the trucker’s stop, and its name- “I Told You Truck Service” (you can see in Sean's post a pic of it). Awesome. The one mechanic there, a small older Hispanic man took one look at our tire and said “Shit. That’s dangerous stuff man.” Glad we stopped when we did. It took the single mechanical about an our to pry the old rusted rim off the axle, and try and remove the old tire. Apparently its been a long time since that tire has been replaced. The tire that he had for us was almost the right size. It’s a 840, and the Club-House’s other tires are all 900s. But the mechanic said it would be all right and sold it to us for a pretty good price.

While waiting for the tire another converted school bus comes pulling into the trucker stop. We call them “like kinds” and got excited to meet them. This school bus looked pretty ruff. Half the white paint was falling off so you could see another not so good layer of red paint beneath it. In giant hand painted letters on the side of the bus it read “Buffalo Tribe”. Awesome. The first guy to approach us from the bus was wearing old work pants and large vivid red suspenders. His hair was flaming red and had facial hair that connected red chops to a chin strap beard to handle bar mustache. Awesome. His name- Red. Red told us he had been on this bus for 3 months, he had met “the old lady” in the forest at some festival and it was her bus. They had picked up others and were riding what they called “The Rainbow Trail”. He asked if we had anything to swamp with them and that we should bring our bus over once the wheel was ready and we can check out each others bus. Their bus was… well… it was disgusting. It was still very bussy, with most the original seats in it, not much had been changed on the interior except for thick curtains, lots of trash, a dismantled bed and 9 dogs. Yes 9 dogs. 6 of which were puppies.

We found out red was 28 originally from Pennsylvania but had been on the road since he was 16. The “old lady” Red had talked about was the only girl, much like myself on our bus. She had to be about my age. I liked her immediately. Very mechanically minded we started talking about our busses and engines, she asked me about how we had done the electricity and plumbing and we had a great time talking about everything from puppies, to buses to life on the road. I could tell she was very smart and had experienced a lot in her life already. Part of me is so jealous of girls like her. She is so free. She roams where ever and when ever she wants. She collects rocks form places she goes and makes jewelry to sell to make the little bit of money she needs to survive. She told me about freight trains she had caught, about hitch hiking for a few years across the country, about how she loves to pick up any hitch-hikers she sees, and feeds any people who are hungry right from her bus. She and I have a lot of similarities for having such different backgrounds and we could both tell it. She invited me to come join her in her travels any time I want. Some day I would LOVE to do that.

We said our goodbyes and headed into the desert to the Great Sand Dunes National Park. Now this was a place I had never heard about until Mr. Q mentioned it in a planning meeting back in Atlanta and said we had to go. Boy was he right. This place was like nothing I’d seen before. It’s in the middle of nowhere. We are driving across large plains, so flat, nothing over a couple feet high in any direction, kinda like Kansas then off in the distance you start to see mountains. Lots of mountains, you can see the snow peaks reflecting the sunshine, the mountain range actually stretches over 180 degrees around these large plains. As we drive straight into the mountains you can start to see the duns. Large brown rolling hills right next to the base of these snow capped mountains at the end of the plains. They seem so out of place, as if someone photo shopped them in place. Apparently the mountain stream break down the rocks into fine grains and deposit them here, the wind in whatever direction it blows in gets maneuvered by the curved mountain range to create a vortex that keeps piling all the sand on top of its self creating the largest sand duns in North America. They think these have been around for anywhere between 75 thousand and 10 million years... the ranger said they are still doing research to try and narrow that time frame down some.

We stopped at the visitors center and I had a blast learning about all the different types of rock that are found in the dunes and how they are made and how the creek that comes down out of mountain stretches for miles in the summer and shrinks almost completely away in the winter. Water surges coming form the mountains are so strong that people can boogie board on the water surge for half a mile down the river at times. Sadly, the snow fall in the area this past winter was extremely minimal and when we first got to the duns the creek couldn’t be seen at all. If you ever want to know more about the dunes, just ask me, because I don’t think everyone reading this blog cares about all the details like my science brain does.

We met up with Sean’s friend Cody (who graduated from Tech back in 08). Cody lives in Denver now and came down with his old snow board to try sand boarding for the first time. We got to climbing the dunes around 1pm and brought with us plenty of things in which to slide down with. The temperature was nice, sunny but with a strong cold wind, but the sand was so warm and so soft. I could go barefoot on this journey without being a moron! Yeah! The climb up was hard. Like sand dose, each step was absorbed; going up hill was even harder. For every step you took you lost at least half a step sliding back down. We aimed for the highest sand dune, about a mile long trip if you went in a straight line and over 800 feet high. Some parts were really steep and many breaks had to be taken. But the view was incredible. Surrounded by dunes on all sides that stretched for miles, then beyond the dunes- snow capped mountains everywhere. Even across the plains you could see more mountains where the sky met the horizon. It was amazing. The colors were unreal. We all kept agreeing how it looked and felt like the dunes were fake; they didn’t belong, and that this was just weird. We made it up to the top of the biggest sand dune in North American and just enjoyed the view. Wow. I wish I was a better writer to describe the colors of nature’s beauty from that vantage point.

Then the fun part, going back down. I tried first on a piece of cardboard, sadly, it hadn’t rained here in a while, so the sand was too quick to move than to let me slide on top. I went no where. I tried plastic bag like we had done on the snow this past winter, and again, no good. Andrew decided it was time for him to be a kid again, gave me his back pack and he laid on his side and took off rolling down the side of the dun, fast. He defiantly got some air and got sand everywhere. Meanwhile Cody was strapping his boots and board on and took off boarding down the dune. That was so cool to watch. Watch the videos, Sean will post some later I hope. I scooted on down, others ran, others fell, all of it was fun. We played on the dunes for hours. Enjoying being little kids, acting like fools; sand angles, burying each other, sand boarding down, tackling each other, a blast. At some point we noticed a big storm coming in. The wind got really strong and the temperature started dropping. Right about this point Andrew realized he had lost his phone. His iphone. And the search began. You think finding a needle in a hay sack is hard? Try finding a phone in miles of sand dunes. By the grace of God up at the top of the largest dune while running up Cody happen to un-bury Andrews iphone! So lucky. Then we all hurried off the dunes as it is so not safe to be up there in a storm.

We parched our bus at the campgrounds, a tight squeeze, just in time as a large rain/snow storm came in. It was miserable outside, made us very appreciative of the Club House. We made pizzas on the bus, delicious, and then pulled out the Guitar Hero. It makes us giggle we when try and call it “camping” on the bus when we are playing video games and drinking beer out of the kegarator.

After the storm passed it cleared up just in time for sunset and a few of us walked down to the creek which was beginning to serge. It was beautiful, the lights of the setting sun on the dunes now toped with snow. The storm couldn’t quite get over the mountain peaks, so the clouds just hung out at the top. The creek that we couldn’t even see a few hours ago was already stretching down to the visitors’ center; you could watch the creek grow with ever serge. It was like the tide coming in, only this wasn’t the ocean, we were still in Colorado. A few dogs were out there running around playing in the creek and sand and it really just completed the scene.

Back at the bus we played a hilarious game of New Mexico Pictionary and laughed the night away. We all went to bed early as it was going to be another early morning.