Watering

Title

Watering

Artist

David Broome

Medium

Photograph

Description

"Watering, Great Sand Dunes National Park, Alamosa County, Colorado"

The Great Sand Dunes of Colorado are a prominent and unique geographic icon of the Southern Rocky Mountains.

The sand dunes began to form just under a half a million years ago, as sedimentary outwash from the floodplains of the Rio Grande and surrounding watersheds of the San Luis Valley were picked up by strong westerly winds. The winds would lose force after passing over the Sange de Christo mountains, before heading east across the plains, and the sand particles were deposited at the base of the range. These geomorphological processes are still at work, today, and the sand dunes still continue to grow.

During the late Pleistocene, the San Luis Valley was home to large herds of prehistoric bison and wooly mammoths. These large herds also attracted the earliest of North America's hunters, who would migrate on foot with the herds. By the late 16th Century, the mammoths were long gone, but the nomadic hunters remained. With the Spanish introduction of horses, Native Americans gradually adopted a horseback riding culture, and Ute, Navajo and Apache tribes would occasionally migrate through the region.

The dunes were likely to have been discovered in the late 16th Century, by small parties of Spanish hunters and trappers, venturing north from their colonies. However, the first written account and formal discovery of the dunes comes from English-American brigadier general and explorer Zebulon Pike during his crossing of the White Mountains (now "Sange de Cristo" Mountains) on his 1806 - 1807 western expedition to explore and map the Arkansas River. In 1810, Pike published accounts of his expeditions, including the expedition to the Southern Rocky Mountains, which were quickly translated into German, French and Dutch, due to their popularity.

The dunes were mentioned again in 1848, in John C. Frémont's account of his winter crossing of the Sange de Cristos, during his expedition to survey the viability of a railroad connection from Saint Louis to San Francisco. Five years later, in October of 1853, Swedish-American military-officer and explorer John Williams Gunnison made the first documented ascent of the dunes during his expedition to survey a route for a Pacific railroad between the 38th and 39th parallels. Gunnison and much of his party were soon-after massacred and mutilated by Pahvant Indians near Lake Sevier as they surveyed deep into Utah Territory.

The second half of the 19th Century saw a surge in homestead development following the Homestead Act of 1862, granting roughly 0.65 square kilometers of free land to those who were eligible and willing to cultivate and inhabit it for at least 5 years. The act was the catalyst for one of the largest migration trends in history, as Old-Immigrant-Americans and Europeans alike set their sights to the West, in the hope of building a better life.

America's Progressive Era, in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries sparked a surge in environmental conservation efforts, and many of the local settlers campaigned for the preservation of the sand dunes. Their efforts paid off, as U.S. President Herbert Hoover formally established the sand dunes as a National Monument in 1932.

As the sand dunes make for a very unique addition to the already vastly diverse geography of the Rocky Mountains and the American West, the National Monument was later granted the honor of becoming America's 58th National Park, in 2004. In close proximity to the Front Range Urban Corridor, the park is frequently visited by families, hikers and nature enthusiasts. Medano Creek, which runs along the southeastern base of the dunes, is a particularly popular spot for children to play, as the creek runs gently through a seemingly endless landscape of sand - perfect for exploration! :)

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October 12th, 2020

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