Early March in Great Sand Dunes National Park is not a season so much as a contradiction — a place where sunlight warms the upper layer of sand while winter lingers inches beneath, waiting. There are no crowds, no summer squeals rolling down the dunes, no children chasing patterns in the sand. Instead, the wind does all the talking, and the dunes themselves feel enormous, ancient, and vaguely disinterested in whoever walks across them.
Into the Quiet
By the time the dunes swallowed the last sound of the trailhead, the cold had already settled into my bones. The sand — frozen at the surface and soft beneath — shifted under my feet like a living thing, and the wind hissed through the basins as if warning me back. From the ridgeline, the Sangre de Cristos looked sharp and close, but every step toward them pulled me deeper into a world that didn’t care if I belonged there. It was my first solo backpacking trip, and somewhere between the silence, the cold, and the rising wind, I realized that solitude isn’t peaceful at first. It’s confrontational. It strips you down until only the essential parts of you remain. The high dune fields stretched like a sea of static waves, frozen in motion. No footprints. No gullies carved by rain. No evidence that anyone had been here in days. I kept my compass in my hip belt pocket even though the direction was obvious: west, toward the mountains. In summer, the dunes can feel playful, almost golden. In late winter, they felt stern — not hostile exactly, but indifferent.
The first mile was all sound: wind rushing through the basins, sand ticking against the fabric of my pants, the labored rhythm of my breath as my pack dug into my shoulders. Then, without warning, the wind dropped. The sound vanished, and I was left with my own heartbeat and the crunch of sand-hard snow under my shoes. The quiet was so sudden it felt engineered — like the dunes were checking to see what I’d do with it. Solitude is romantic in theory — the promise of clarity, introspection, some tidy narrative about “finding yourself.” But walking alone toward a distant mountain crest with no shelter, no water source, and no one who could hear you if you screamed does something different to the mind. It fractures certainty. It turns small things enormous. Without another voice to lean against, even the sky felt larger. Every so often I stopped just to look around, confirming that I truly was alone out there — not metaphorical solitude but its literal version, where no one knows where you are except in concept.
Dunes That Move When You Don’t
Most landscapes are static unless the weather intervenes. These dunes are dynamic even when the air is still. With every step I took, the ground rearranged itself beneath me, erasing where I’d been and offering no path toward where I was going. I paused often — not because the miles were difficult (though they were), but because my brain kept losing its spatial confidence. There are tricks for moving through dunes: pick high points, follow the lines of ridges, rest on leeward sides. But no trick prepares you for the scale. From below, the dunes are hills. From above, they’re entire mountain ranges made of sand. A ridge that looked like it sat a few hundred yards away might be a mile. A basin that looked halfway up a slope might actually be the top.
The absence of trails forced a kind of intentionality. I checked my bearing, chose a landmark, walked until the landmark slid behind another ridge, then checked again. It was slow navigation, but satisfying in its own way — like building trust with an unfamiliar body. Somewhere in that middle stretch, the psychological dissonance set in. I was moving through a landscape that felt hostile to human presence: no shade, no water, no shelter, no sound. And yet, instead of shrinking under the scale of it, I felt myself expanding, as if my edges had gotten looser. Fear didn’t disappear, exactly, but it became less special. Just another presence in the sand.
At a high point, the Sangres looked close enough to touch — jagged blue and white above the desert floor. I took off my pack, hummed warmth into my gloves, and turned a slow circle. The park’s main attraction — those laughing summer dunes — was out of view. What remained was stark: alpine foothills, empty sand, small patches of frozen snow hiding in shaded hollows. I took a photo, not because it was beautiful (though it was), but because I wanted proof of the loneliness later.
The Business of Survival
People romanticize solitude until it’s time to do the logistical parts alone. The backcountry here requires water to be carried in. Creeks are seasonal, and in winter they run shallow, cold, and mostly sealed beneath ice. My pack felt heavy with bottles but light with everything else — just a small one-person tent, a stove, a sleeping bag, and layers for a sub-freezing night. Around mid-afternoon, the temperature started dropping faster than expected. The winter sun, still low in March, cast everything in long, blue shadows that made it harder to read the terrain. I began looking for a flat place to camp — a relative term in dune country. Every basin had its own microclimate. The north sides held cold. The south sides held glare. The ridges held wind that could gut a lightweight tent. Eventually, I found a small swale just before the transition zone where the dunes grow patchy and brush begins to appear. Not perfect, but workable. Setting up camp in sand is a test of improvisation. Stakes pull out easily, guylines loosen, and wind turns tent fabric into sails. I buried “deadman” anchors, built from heavy-duty sand screws I’d specifically packed for this trip. By the time the shelter was secure, my fingers were numb enough that lighting the stove felt like threading a needle with oven mitts.
Dinner was a freeze-dried meal eaten half-squatting, half-kneeling in the sand as I watched the light fade off the north face of the dunes. I boiled extra water and poured it into a metal bottle to sleep with — the kind of small luxury that buys warmth in a cold camp. Day turned quickly to dusk, and dusk to dark. As soon as the world went fully black, the wind returned — not as a whisper moving through the basins, but as a sustained, muscular force that felt like it originated in the spine of the mountains. It hit the tent broadside, flattening the fabric and bending the poles in long, vibrating arcs. The guylines thrummed like instrument strings, and sand peppered the fly in a relentless horizontal hiss.
I have slept through storms in the desert, through thunderheads forming over alpine bowls, through 40-mph gusts on exposed ridges. But I had never experienced wind like this — a continuous, freighted roar that seemed to erase the space between gusts so that everything became one long impact. Had I trusted normal backpacking stakes, the tent would have been airborne within minutes. Even with sand screws, the tent leaned and bucked, the guy-outs pulling so hard that I began mentally cataloging what I’d do if the shelter failed: bivy in the swale, ride out the night behind my pack, wait for first light.
Lying there, listening to fabric strain and zipper teeth rattle, I understood the word exposed in a new way. There was no rock wall to duck behind, no trees to break the wind, no alternate campsite around the corner. It was just me, a thin membrane of nylon, and weather that felt wholly indifferent to whether I lasted the night. Fear hovered at the edge of awareness — the quiet, practical kind, not the dramatic cinematic version. It whispered logistical questions instead of existential ones. And yet, the longer the wind hammered the tent, the less power that fear seemed to have over me. I didn’t transcend it; I simply acclimated. Eventually, the violence of the weather became background noise, my body choosing sleep over worry. Sometime after midnight, exhaustion won.
Morning as Reckoning
I woke to silence. The kind of silence that makes sound feel like an intrusion. Frost covered the inside of the tent where my breath had condensed and frozen overnight. My water bottles were slushy even inside the tent. My boots were stiff. When I unzipped the fly, the light outside was colorless — pale, cold, and clear. The dunes looked sculpted rather than formed, every ridge sharp, every trough shadowed. I sat in the entrance of my tent drinking hot oatmeal straight from the pot and felt something I hadn’t felt theday before: ownership over my presence there. Not dominance. Not mastery. Just a quiet acknowledgment that I could occupy the space without needing permission from fear.
Packing up was slow. Sand gets into everything, especially when it’s mixed with frost. I shook out tent fabric, brushed ice from the zipper, and warmed my boots against my stomach until they were pliable enough to lace. When I cinched my pack and started east toward the trailhead, the wind began to rise again, smoothing out my camp prints almost immediately. Walking out of a place you entered alone feels different than walking in. The landscape doesn’t change, but your relationship with it does. I no longer felt like a trespasser. I felt like a participant. Only near the last ridge did I see the first sign of other people: two small figures far off on the lower dunes, their silhouettes moving along a slope. They looked impossibly distant. Part of me wanted to turn back into the emptiness.
What Solitude Demands
People often talk about solo trips in terms of bravery, like the absence of company is some heroic act. But solitude isn’t inherently courageous. In many ways, it’s simply inconvenient. There is no one to split weight with, no one to talk through decisions with, no one to blame when you make a bad call. The interesting part isn’t the solitude itself — it’s what solitude forces you to confront. Without witnesses, your fears get loud. Without distractions, your inner narration becomes unignorable. Without external affirmation, your sense of identity loosens. What surprised me most in the dunes wasn’t how scared I felt, but how quickly fear dissolved once it was acknowledged. I didn’t overcome it. I didn’t transcend it. It just lost its leverage when I stopped arguing with it. In the modern world, we treat fear like a malfunction — something to fix, avoid, or cure. In the dunes, fear felt like information. When the wind rose, fear reminded me to secure my tent. When darkness fell, fear reminded me to stay aware. When morning came, fear was obsolete. There was no moral judgment attached to it. Just utility.
A Landscape That Shrinks and Expands You
Great Sand Dunes National Park is a geological anomaly — the tallest dunes in North America, stacked against a mountain range that feeds them and traps them. But as striking as the terrain is, the real confrontation is psychological. To move alone through that landscape, especially in winter, is to be reminded of your actual size in the universe. None of the stories we tell ourselves about importance or identity matter outthere. Not our titles, our anxieties, our triumphs, or our failures. The dunes don’t care whether you’re confident or terrified. They don’t care if you’ve trained for years or wandered in by accident. They don’t care if you write about them later. And somehow, that indifference is liberating. When the world stops mirroring you back at yourself, you’re forced to look inward. Not in a self-indulgent way, but in a clarifying one. For me, the clarity was simple: I had always perceived myself as more breakable than I actually was. The dunes didn’t make me stronger; they made me more accurate.
The Walk Back to Noise
When I reached the last crest and heard distant voices again — children laughing, someone yelling up a slope — I felt the return of the human world as both comfort and weight. We are social creatures. We require each other. But there is something vital about learning who you are in the absence of an audience. At the trailhead, I set my pack down and brushed sand from my hair and sleeves. I didn’t leave the park believing solitude is better than companionship, or that fear is something to chase. I left with something quieter: permission. Permission to take up space without apology. Permission to experience discomfort without translating it into crisis. Permission to trust myself in landscapes that don’t perform confidence for me. Most environments reflect us back to ourselves in some way. The dunes do not. And maybe that’s why they stay with you.
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