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Great Sand Dunes National Park
North America's tallest dunes beneath Colorado's Sangre de Cristo Mountains
Star Dune rises about 750 feet (229 m) above the floor of Colorado's San Luis Valley, the tallest sand dune in North America. It anchors a dunefield of about 30 square miles (78 km²) piled against the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, built over tens of thousands of years as southwest winds swept sand from old lakebeds and streams across the valley and opposing storm winds pushed it back. Each spring, snowmelt sends Medano Creek around the base of the dunes in rhythmic surges, a seasonal beach far from any coast.
The park and its preserve climb from grassland and wetlands at about 7,500 feet (2,290 m) to alpine tundra at 13,604 feet (4,146 m) on Tijeras Peak. Native peoples gave the dunes their own names. To the Ute they were sand that moves, and Tewa tradition places an emergence lake nearby, while Blanca Peak just to the southeast is one of the four sacred mountains of the Navajo. Herbert Hoover proclaimed a national monument in 1932, and it became a national park in 2004. It was named an International Dark Sky Park in 2019.