SAND DUNES, CAVES and MORE

 We left Durango at about 12 noon the temp was 94* and headed east into the mountains.  Less than  two hours later we crossed the continental divide at 10,400 feet and the temp was 51*.  There is a highway maintenance yard at the top and the trucks all had snowplows on,  it can snow here any day of the year.  We had seen on the map the great sand dunes and as it is only about 16 miles from the highway we stopped in.

 The dunes cover 35 square miles of  pure sand.  The top is only about 500 feet high. The sand is stable but quite loose and difficult to wall in.  For some reason all the pictures did not show here. I may be able to post some more in a later blog.

 The sand dunes are in south central Colorado and we turned and headed straight north and I do mean straight. U.S. highway 71 in Colorado and into Nebraska goes dead straight for mile after mile, and we see nothing except miles and miles of barren land broken  every hundred miles or so will those unsightly windmills.  As we drove further north we begin to see beef cattle in the fields. we continued on into South Dakota to Wind Cave National Park.  The underground passages have been mapped to over 1300 miles and there is still more unmapped.

 This is the first natural opening found, the cave gets its name from the wind that blows out from the hole.  A 16 year old kid climbed in to explore the caves in 1890 and stayed underground for several weeks to explore using just candle power and food he carried with him.

 Today we have stairs built to get us down 220 steps to start our tour, most of which is 200+ feet underground.

 This is called boxwork.  Ninety five percent of all the known boxwork in the world is here at Wind Caves.   It does look like boxes of all difference sizes and shapes hanging from the ceiling.

 There are rocks and all types of mineral deposits in lots of colors and formations.  This is called popcorn.

 Like all caves there are lots of smaller dead end tunnels, most of what we saw were just passages from 1-2 feet wide to several feet and not really very high or long.. The caves we had visited earlier in Oregon had huge caverns 2-300 feet in length.

There is lots of colour, this is caused by  mineral laden water evaporating and leaving the mineral behind.