Great Sand Dunes: Sunset

We took advantage of the Memorial Day Weekend to visit another National Park we hadn't been to yet: Great Sand Dunes. Just a four-hour drive from Denver, the park turned out to be a completely unique experience due in large part to the extremely windy conditions. Gusts got up over 50 miles per hour!

All that wind and sand seemed like it would result in some interesting viewing conditions for sunset, so I headed back that evening to see for myself.  This shot reminds me of a pointillist painting like the one by Georges Seurat in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, not because my ISO was obscenely high (it was only 1600) but because of all of the sand in the air.

Another shot approaching the park.

You can see a tiny piece of Medano Creek on the left of this shot.

As the sun descended, the haze in the air started to impart a golden sheen to everything.

I love the careless air the article of clothing left on the wooden walkway lends to this moment.

Many thanks to the magpie who decided the foreground of this shot was missing a little something.  He was probably right.

You get a sense of how vast the dunes are -- more than 30 square miles worth -- as they and Medano Creek disappear at some point off to the southwest.

A few hardy souls were still straggling back from hikes into the dunes.

I'd noticed this dead tree just south of the park entrance on our visit earlier in the day, and hoped it might lend itself to interesting shots at sunset.

Full disclosure -- I "cheated" a bit on these next three shots by setting the white balance to 10000 Kelvin, a little trick I picked up in the Gerlach Nature Photography workshop earlier this spring.  Yes, the sunset had a reddish tint.  Just not as apocalyptically as these images indicate.

Dead trees -- making my photographs more interesting since 2008.

I now understand what sort of sky U2 named their live album for.

The sun seemed to just disappear well above the horizon, because all the sand in the air obscured the San Juan Mountains on the opposite side of the San Luis Valley.

It was a 35-minute drive from our hotel in Alamosa to the park, but I'm glad I went back to see that sunset!