White Shell / Great Sand Dunes

Rio Grande del Norte, NM to Great Sand Dunes National Park, CO | Camping in White Shell BLM Area | Alamosa, CO | October 2024

We woke up from our last day in Rio Grande del Norte very early. Or at least, I woke up very early in order to take a work call that was on Eastern time. The work call was all very hypothetical regarding a site in North Carolina and after we finished, I joined Jess and Charlotte back in bed to warm back up and wait for the sun and its warmth.

Our plan for the day was to head back up towards Alamosa, Colorado and the Great Sand Dunes area. And I had a strong desire to find a way to hike Blanca Peak over the next few days.

We packed up the van, restocked our water, and hit the road heading North. There were low clouds in the sky to the North and covering parts of the Sangre de Cristo range which didn’t bode well for my hiking plans, but today was a driving day, not a hiking day.

We passed through the very scenic and historic town of San Luis, but decided not to stop. We were running low on food so had planned to drive all the way out to Alamosa before backtracking to our chosen hiking and camping area. The driving was long and uneventful but as we approached Blanca Peak (always present on the horizon when in the San Luis valley) clouds descended upon the peak and we could make out wisps of snow.

After getting groceries in Alamosa we treated ourselves (and Charlotte) to Sonic before returning back East towards the base of Blanca Peak. The area surrounding the base of the peak is BLM land called ‘White Shell’ (the anglicized Navajo name for Blanca Peak) and there is a long access road leading up the slope of the mountain. The upper portions of the road are really degraded and barely suitable for 4×4 vehicles, let alone our van, but the lower slopes are well graded if sandy.

We found an open spot across from a heli-pad and set up the van for the evening. From where we stood, we were able to see up the road quite a ways and saw so many other vans or RVs spread out. The area was a bit trashed from overuse, had an unpleasant odor depending on the direction of the wind, and we felt pretty exposed, All that to say, it was nice to stay somewhere for free so close to a national park, and that could conceivably be a starting point for a 14er attempt, but it definitely wasn’t the nicest spot that we’ve stayed. But it’d be hard for any campsite to live up to the one we had just enjoyed in Rio Grande del Norte. Once we were settled in, I happened to look at my calendar and noticed a new meeting…in 5 minutes. I quickly hopped on just in time.

Without going into details, the hypothetical situation from the morning was turning into a very real scenario and my company wanted me to be out in North Carolina very soon. The only problem is that no one was quite ready to fully commit to me flying out there and there was no definitive timeline.

With that our plans for the weekend were blown out the window. We were now bound to waiting for someone to give the go ahead for me to buy a plane ticket. Our plans of hanging around Great Sand Dunes for a weekend – gone. My plans for hiking Blanca – gone. Worse, the snow we had seen at on the peak was the fore-runner of a snow storm that was going to hit the rest of the valley.

Needless to say, things were tense. We were too far away to reasonably drive to North Carolina – nor did we really want to. But Jess wasn’t comfortable to be on her own with the van and Charlie for an indefinite period of time with poor weather on the way. The lack of a definitive timeline just made things that much more frustrating, and we went to sleep unhappy.

We did our best to carry out our plans the next morning, which involved driving up to Great Sand Dunes National Park. We had visited here just over two years ago at the start of our nomadic life, and it was fun returning and reminiscing on those first few days on the road. We were able to get NPS stamps this time, then drove to the dunes to walk around. I had another meeting later in the morning so I returned to the van while Jess hung out with Charlotte, wandering around and sunbathing in the sand.

Like last time, we knew how much there was that we could do in this area aside from the sand dunes, but the new potential change in plans put a damper on things and we needed to figure out what to do in the meantime. We decided that we didn’t want to camp another night at White Shell, so we started looking for other options. Should we book it back to Iowa so Jess and Charlie could be comfortable with her family, since we were planning on heading there next week anyway? But then if it turned out that I didn’t have to go to NC, we would have just lost our last week in Colorado, and all the counties we wanted to get in Kansas on our way back. We could find a place for Jess to hunker down in the San Luis Valley while I fly out of the small airport in Alamosa, but again the weather wasn’t looking great and I didn’t know how long I would be gone, and we did eventually need to start making our way back to Iowa.

Ultimately, we decided to just find a better spot to camp tonight and try to make the most of our time here, however long we had left. We drove about 30 minutes West, past Alamosa, to another BLM site to stay until we actually knew what was going on. By the end of today, I still didn’t know if and when I had to leave, but at least we managed to find a much better place to camp.