Weekend run completed. Made the run over Medano pass into the Great Sand Dunes National Park with my nephew Martin and my friends Bill in the Tacoma and John and his son Tony in the TJ Wrangler. Just to skip to the answer for an obvious question if I broke anything and the answer is no. But it wasn’t for a lack of trying.
We took off at 9:00 Saturday and made our way over to the trail off of state hwy 69. The trail gains elevation quickly to give a view of the valley we came from. It’s a little peek of the fall color we should get into on the other side.
Medano Pass is a pretty basic trail that most stock pickups can handle. This is an alternative entrance to Great Sand Dunes National Park. The cool thing is if you enter through this you don’t have to pay the park entry fee.
We are probably only a few days early to the peak of the color change, but it’s still very pretty.
The trail comes down quickly into the valley. We broke for lunch early. That’s my nephew Martin on the right and Tony on the left there.
John’s little TJ is still evolving. It’s now sitting on a fresh long arm suspension system. By the looks of how it drove on the trail it’s a hell of an improvement.
Nice to see it on a trail than apart in my driveway for the last week.
It may be a basic trail, but this time of year the views are great.
Here come Bill down to us.
More views.
After crossing Medano creek a bunch of times you can see the dunes come into view.
The trail changes to straight sand at this point. It varies from shallow to deep in spots. Driving on the dunes is not allowed, so this is the closest one can get to doing so.
We rolled past crowded parking areas with tons of people. Our need to be away from people and sense for adventure started kicking in. The original plan was to come down to the dunes, then back up the trail we came in on to find a campsite. Problem was the time was only around 1:00, even with 30 minutes to get back up to the campsite we would have a lot of daylight to kill.
Bill is normally dead set against setting up camp that early. He throws the follow statement at me: “You know Blanca is just down the road from here.” I respond to Bill that he’s lost his mind. For those that don’t know Blanca peak road is one of the toughest in the state. So Bill, John and I rationalize this idea down to we’ll go as far as we can and turn back when it gets really hairy and then find a campsite to crash at. Bill’s been up here years ago on a quad so he had an idea what we were in for. I had my trail book in the console and the description showed glowing reports for being nasty. Blanca’s main challenges are named Jaws 1, 2, 2 ½, 3 and 4. The main gatekeeper is Jaws 2. That’s spot we feel we probably can’t get over, but what the hell we are going for it.
Keep in mind just getting to this point from the road had us run up a straight mile of annoyingly loose river rock before the trail dives into thick juniper trees.
We gain elevation quickly and at times can look back across the vast San Luis valley.
I’m waiting for some additional pics from my nephew as from the point of the trail sign I had my hands full. Steep climbs with loose rock and tight switchbacks had me putting all my focus on the task at hand. The trail does start making it’s way up a section with more tight Juniper trees where the camper is getting tagged from both sides at the same time.
We made it up a serious climb after a switchback where 3 other trucks stopped. We assumed this was Jaws 1. After looking at other trail reports what we thought was Jaws 2 is actually Jaws 1. Bill reaches it first and radios back for us to come up and check it out with him. We see this mess down the trail from Jaws 1.
That’s a freshly rolled Cherokee. It’s missing the windshield, front driveshaft and bashed on each bumper and every panel. If that’s not a sign of what not to do I don’t know what is.
The survey crew getting into position.
Ok, the guys are on Jaws 1. To the very left is the edge of the shelf that leads to certain doom if you screw up. The idea would be to head up the chute to the right (just over the center of the hood and to the right of Martin) and then hook a hard left on top to go straight over the fin that cuts the trail diagonally. The problem here is that fin has a straight drop on the backside. You can see oil spillage in the center where somebody nailed the rock. We at first thought of skirting the whole thing by hanging way left but the rock would force your ride to tilt right at the downhill slope below the shelf.
