National Park Status Sought for Great Sand Dunes

Prospectors were digging for traces of gold in the massive sand formations in the San Luis Valley, and cement trucks were hauling away piles of sand, when area residents halted the plunder by getting the dunes declared a national monument in 1932.

Sixty-eight years later, a campaign is underway to upgrade the Great Sand Dunes National Monument to a national park to block grabs for the water that helped shape the 750-foot dunes, the tallest in North America.

Supporters, including leaders of towns throughout southern Colorado, also want to preserve the unique ecosystem and boost the economy in one of Colorado’s poorest regions.

“We wanted to show this was a grass-roots effort, to dispel the notion it was forced on us by the federal government,” said Dion Stewart, a hydro-geology professor at Adams State College in Alamosa, 35 miles from the monument.

Rep. Scott McInnis (R-Colo.) is sponsoring legislation to make the 60-square-mile site, about 160 miles south of Denver, into a park. Sen. Wayne Allard (R-Colo.) has a similar bill in the Senate.

The Clinton administration strongly supports the plan, although Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt would like to see 1,284 acres declared a wilderness. He also is worried that water from the valley still could be sold. Allard said he believes those concerns will be addressed.

Rep. Joel Hefley (R-Colo.), a ranking member of the House Parks and Public Lands subcommittee, is the only member of the state’s congressional delegation who opposes the plan.

He has said the dunes, which hug the bottom of the snowy Sangre de Cristo mountains and draw 300,000 visitors a year, aren’t distinctive enough to be a national park.

Hefley has voted against national parks proposed in other states for the same reason, said Sarah Shelden, Hefley’s spokeswoman.

McInnis said, “My position is he ought to let it go to the House floor. Something like a national park should not be decided by one congressman.”

“My God, you see 14,000-foot peaks and walk out there and it’s like Egypt,” McInnis said.

Ranger Patrick Myers, head of the monument’s education programs, says the dunes constitute one of the most biodiverse areas in the world.

A visitor can hike from ragged sagebrush-dotted grasslands at 8,200 feet, to towering sand dunes sculpted by shifting winds, and up to snowy, 13,000-foot-plus peaks and alpine lakes--all within four miles.

Deer, elk, foxes, kangaroo rats, beavers, coyotes, mountain lions and bighorn sheep can be spotted passing through cottonwood groves, stands of aspen and a forest of spruce, fir and pine trees.

“The area has about 12 mountain peaks over 13,000 feet,” Myers said.

The area is also home to seven species--six insects and a mouse--not found anywhere else in the world.

And underneath is the treasure considered the key to the dunes’ stability and the valley’s economy: water.

The San Luis Valley gets 10 inches of precipitation a year, yet is a major farming area and breeding ground for waterfowl thanks to extensive irrigation from the Rio Grande River and wetlands that are fed by a massive underground water formation.

The water also helped mold the dunes, which are cradled in a crescent shape at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains because of snow-fed creeks that flow across the dunes.

Myers said the moisture and huge aquifer under the Connecticut-size San Luis Valley help hold the dunes in place. The sand is always moist about a foot below the surface--the result, it is thought, of absorption of ground water.

The dunes’ foundation was laid about 25 million years ago through erosion of the San Juan Mountains 50 miles to the west. Southwest winds sweep sand from the San Juans and ancient riverbeds across the down-sloping valley floor to the Sangre de Cristos.

The Clinton administration’s proposed budget included $8.5 million as down payment for the 100,000-acre Baca Ranch north of the dunes. Although it shares the same name, Colorado’s Baca Ranch is different from another Baca Ranch in New Mexico that the federal government paid $101 million to buy this month.

Supporters want the private Baca land in Colorado included in the park that would encompass the dunes, in large part to protect the water. That would nearly quadruple the monument’s size.

Owners of the ranch have tried to sell the rights to the ground water and pump it out of the valley to Colorado’s booming Front Range, where cities like Colorado Springs and Aurora are always looking for new water sources. The Colorado Supreme Court ruled against a plan in 1994 because the potential impacts weren’t clear.

McInnis said “a number of discussions are being held” with Gary Boyce, who bought the ranch for $17 million in the early 1990s. Boyce wants to export ground water but first must go through several legal steps.

The Black Canyon of the Gunnison River, 250 miles southwest of Denver, was upgraded from a monument to a national park last year. It was the first new national park in five years.

Support for doing the same for Great Sand Dunes is strong across the state, McInnis said.

“I intend to make this a national campaign,” he said.