A few months ago my wife and I decided to take a family trip to one of the closest national parks to where we live in central Oklahoma. Having already visited Hot Springs National Park a few years prior, our options this time around included White Sands, Big Bend, and Great Sand Dunes. The first was just a bit too far for what we wanted to drive, while the second was a bit too warm given the time of year that we intended to travel. Great Sand Dunes, then, was kind of the default option but also quite an interesting and, the more we learned about it, exciting option to boot. We watched videos, talked to friends, booked an Airbnb, and set plans in motion for a grand adventure out west.
The reality of the experience surpassed anything we could have, or did, conceive of. We had visited Rocky Mountain National Park with friends in the summer of 2022, but this was an entirely different experience altogether despite being only a few hours south of its much bigger, and much more well-known, counterpart. (Or should I say, counterpark?) Nestled in a bend in the mountain range that stretches from Santa Fe to Salida, the Great Sand Dunes rise over 700 feet and stretch on for, as Gollum would say, miles and miles to the horizon where they are dwarfed by the towering peaks of Grestone Needle, Blueberry, and Mt. Lindsey. It’s an amazing sight and one that is quite unique in the United States–mountains are one thing, but mountains supplemented by 30 square miles of positively massive sand dunes is quite another matter entirely.
So of course I had to get some photos :)
The shot you see here was taken with my humble little GoPro Hero 12 Black, set to the Star Trails capture mode looking north from Dunes Rest, the Airbnb we rented for our stay. I set the camera on my tripod, put it in wide mode (as opposed to full-screen which captures a more square-shaped view but also has greater lens barrel distortion, told it to begin the capture at 12:30am, and went back inside to spend time with my wife, our kids, and my cousin and her husband who joined us for a day and two nights.
While the night wasn’t as clear and cloudless as I had hoped, I was quite pleased with what I was able to capture. Far in the distance you can see the yellow sand dunes and behind them, the mountains. I tweaked the colors just a bit in Lightroom but otherwise what you see here is exactly what my GoPro captured, and even though there’s not much in the way of detail (zoom in on the foliage in the foreground and you’ll see naught but a muddly, blurry mess) the fact that I was able to get this with a tiny little action camera still kind of blows my mind.
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