Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve - Mosca, CO 🇺🇸

☁️ cloudy day on the Smith’s visit 🥺
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📚 In 1853 a Gold Rush was going on. The idea that the Dunes could be destroyed by gold mining or concrete-making alarmed residents of Alamosa and Monte Vista. By the 1920s, the Dunes had become a source of pride for local people, and a potential source of tourist dollars for local businesses. Members of the Ladies P.E.O. lobbied politicians, asking for national monument status for Great Sand Dunes. Widely supported by local people, a presidential proclamation was signed in 1932 by President Herbert Hoover. Similar support in the late 1990s resulted in the monument’s expansion into a *national park and preserve* in 2004. Today, hundreds of thousands of people visit Great Sand Dunes each year, brought perhaps by the same interests that brought us—the oddly beautiful combination of desert dunes and high mountain peaks 😍 🏔
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🏂 Sandboard is permitted at the Great Sand Dunes and they have a good amount of places in the area that rents them 🥳