Great Sand Dunes Brushed by Rain in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains

The Great Sand Dunes National Park is brushed by rain underneath a localized rainstorm.  Please open full screen to really experience these images.

Clear skies shine bright blue above the rainclouds in this image I lensed while exploring the wilderness of the Zapata Ranch on the high desert of San Luis Valley in Colorado.  

Looking to the northeast at the Great Sand Dunes National Park you can see the near perfect semi-circular border pattern on the ground between the sand dunes and the edge of the desert floor on the right side of this image.  

This image is the right side photo to a pair of images I lensed of this rainstorm. The other image was featured in this previous post here.  And below is the other image which is geographically on the left side of the image above:

Great Sand Dunes National Park contains the tallest sand dunes in North  America which rise to a maximum height of 750 feet / 229 m, from the  floor of the San Luis Valley on the western base of the Sangre de Cristo  Range. 

The dunes cover an area of about 19,000 acres / 7,700 ha.  Researchers say that the dunes started forming less than 440,000 years  ago and were created from sand and soil deposits of the Rio Grande and  its tributaries, flowing through the San Luis Valley. 

Over ages, the glaciers that fed the river and vast lake that existed across the valley melted away, and the water evaporated. Westerly winds picked  up the exposed remaining sand particles from the dry lake and river  flood plain.  As the wind eventually lost power prior to  crossing the Sangre de Cristo Range, the sand was deposited on the east  edge of the valley, creating the piled up dunes we see today. 

This  process still continues, and the dunes are slowly growing. The wind  changes the shape of the dunes daily as it continues to move sand from  the middle of the valley northward. 
(Research Source) 

The following image is of the Sangre de Cristo Mountain range which towers above the Great Sand Dune National Park. You can see the dunes at the base of the mountains on the right side 

These are the towering mountains of the Sangre de Cristo (Spanish for "Blood of Christ") the  southernmost subrange of the Rocky Mountains. 

What I love about this image is that the clouds above the mountains are mirroring the shape of the mountains but in the sky! I call this image "Mountains In The Sky".

This range runs from  Poncha Pass in South-Central Colorado, trending southeast and south, and  ends at the Glorieta Pass, just southeast of Santa Fe, New Mexico. This range used  to be called "La Sierra Nevada", "La Sierra Madre", "La Sierra", and  "The Snowies" (used by English speakers). 

In 1719 the Spanish explorer  Antonio Valverde y Cosio named the range Sangre de Cristo ("Blood of  Christ") mountains after being impressed by the reddish hue of the snowy  peaks at sunrise, alpenglow.
(Research Source) 

Folks I really appreciate you taking time to check out these images and my work. I do hope you enjoy learning about these remarkable places and seeing these sites that are so rarely experienced. 

 These images and the overall story are from my ongoing project in which I am trying to raise awareness of the 47% of the USA and 90% of Canada that remain unpopulated wilderness.  

Where Eagles Fly - The American Wilderness Expedition is my personal mission to introduce people to these amazing locations that surround us.  

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Yehaw!!