Colorado’s Great Sand Dunes Have a Strange Crater — And Its Origins Remain Unsolved

One of the biggest tourist attractions in Colorado is the Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve, a nearly 150,000-acre area in the state’s southern region near Alamosa.

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One of Colorado’s four National Parks, the Great Sand Dunes were first established as a National Monument in 1932 and are home to the tallest sand dunes in North America.

However, mystery surrounds one part of the park in the form of a crater that, while studied by world-renowned scientists, has an origin that remains unclear to this day.

Colorado’s Great Sand Dunes’ Mysterious Crater

The crater, which is located roughly 0.25 miles off of the park’s Liberty Gate Trailhead on the northern section of the Great Sand Dunes, was discovered many years ago.

While scientists had spent time looking at the crater in the past, it wouldn’t be until the 1960s that, curious about how the crater may have been formed, scientists from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C., traveled to the Great Sand Dunes in an attempt to discover how it was formed.

At the time, these researchers determined that the crater was formed by the wind and was subsequently covered by grass, although this theory has since been debunked.

How Was Colorado’s Great Sand Dunes’ Crater Formed?

Since the original theory from the Smithsonian was debunked, numerous other theories surrounding the crater’s origin have been established.

One of these includes theories that the crater was formed by a meteorite, though no evidence of a meteorite has been found. It has also been speculated that the crater is a result of something known as a sand boil, which is described as follows by the National Park Service:

Watery sand deposits are squeezed and pushed up along a fault line.

Learn more from the National Park Service about the Great Sand Dunes’ crater here.