Coral Pink Sand Dunes

Visited: September 2017 (and childhood)

I remembered being blown away by this park as a kid. And I grew up a stone's throw from the GREAT Sand Dunes National Park. The sand really is a coral color. So of course I had to take all my fellow educators there after school one day. It was the other girls' first trip to Arizona (you have to duck through AZ to get to the dirt road into the park) and Phil's first trip to the park, after years of wanting to go during each school trip to St. George.

When we got there, I demanded we take a "band photo" of our group of Reaction Time educators. The result:

I love it

Justina and Glynis and I frolicked over the dunes and Phil walked around the lower dunes to get his steps in :)

It was so much fun to be a child and scramble up and down the dunes, and watch the sand flow over itself almost like a fluid as we stomped around the slopes.

When we finally went to the bottom of the dunes, we started to notice the smaller things. Some flowers still thriving in late September and some pretty preserved ones that dried out nicely in the summer.

Glynis, fellow geologist, and I both noticed some perfectly round small black rocks in the low points between dunes. We thought maybe there were seeds? There were so many though. Glynis put it together that they were iron concretions. Deep into a geologic paper that night, I found out they were Moqui Marbles.

Image from link source above

As a child, I earned a junior ranger badge here

I am not sure if they still have this program, I didn't see a visitor center, just the entrance booth, and it wasn't advertised there.