Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
50 free Great Sand Dunes National Park trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Great Sand Dunes National Park trivia quiz covers the strange corner of Colorado's San Luis Valley where the tallest dunes in North America pile up against the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Questions cover how the sand got there and why it stays, Star Dune and High Dune, Medano Creek and its rare surge flow, the sand sheet and sabkha, sandboarding, the 4WD road over Medano Pass and the sand that can reach 150 degrees on a summer afternoon. There is plenty of natural and human history too: the tiger beetle found nowhere else on Earth, the Ute and Navajo names for the dunes and Blanca Peak, Zebulon Pike's 1807 journal, the Herard and Trujillo homesteads, the 1932 gold mill, the P.E.O. Sisterhood's campaign for Herbert Hoover's monument and the 2004 upgrade to a national park and preserve. Difficulty runs from easy to expert and is marked on every question, so it works for a road-trip game or a serious park-nerd challenge. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia or National Park Service pages and each question carries its citation. If you enjoy it, try our US National Parks quiz next.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Great Sand Dunes National Park lies in the south-central part of which US state?
Colorado
The dunes sit on the eastern edge of the San Luis Valley, a high desert basin roughly the size of Connecticut.
Q 02The park's dunes hold what continental record?
Tallest in North America
They rise up to 750 feet from the valley floor and hold an estimated 1.2 cubic miles of sand.
Q 03According to the National Park Service, which of these rises 750 feet from base to crest?
Star Dune
High Dune on the first ridge climbs only 699 feet from its base but starts on higher ground, so its crest is actually higher above sea level.
Q 04The main dune field covers roughly how many square miles?
30
The flatter, grassy sandy plain around it is far bigger and actually holds about 90 percent of all the sand in the park.
Q 05The Sangre de Cristo range behind the dunes is the southernmost subrange of which larger system?
The Rockies
They run from Poncha Pass down to Glorieta Pass near Santa Fe, and the northern stretch holds several fourteeners.
Q 06The name Sangre de Cristo is Spanish for what?
Blood of Christ
It may refer to the red alpenglow on snowy peaks; legend says they were the last words of a priest killed by Native Americans.
Q 07Which president proclaimed Great Sand Dunes a national monument in March 1932?
Herbert Hoover
A women's civic group sponsored the bill after locals feared industry could destroy the dunes.
Q 08Which women's organisation sponsored the bill to protect the dunes as a national monument?
P.E.O. Sisterhood
By the 1920s residents of the valley towns saw the dunes as a source of pride and potential tourist dollars.
Q 09In which year was Great Sand Dunes formally established as a national park and preserve?
2004
Congress authorised the change in 2000; the new park and preserve is about four times the size of the old monument.
Q 10What threat to the dunes did the 1932 monument specifically aim to head off?
Gold mining and cement making
The Volcanic Mining Company built a mill that year to recover the metal from the sand, but the tiny returns never paid.
Q 11Visitors reaching the dunes in late spring must first wade across which wide, shallow stream?
Medano
It usually peaks from late May to early June and from July to April is often no more than a few inches deep, if it flows at all.
Q 12Water in the creek beside the dunes arrives in pulses. What is this rare phenomenon called?
Surge flow
Little sand dams form and collapse underwater about every 20 seconds, sending wave-like pulses that can reach 20 inches high in a wet year.
Q 13Sand surface temperatures on the dunes can reach what on a summer afternoon?
150 °F
Rangers advise hiking early or late and wearing real shoes; sandals are not enough, and pets' paws blister quickly.
Q 21What moisture content beneath the dry surface helps hold the dunes together?
7%
That dampness lets kangaroo rats, scurfpea, blowout grass and an endemic insect live in the dune field itself.
Q 22What dating technique do scientists use to try to work out the age of the dunes?
Optically stimulated luminescence
It measures how long quartz grains have been buried in the dark; results range from a few hundred to tens of thousands of years, so the dunes' age remains debated.
Q 23Which endemic insect, marked with a violin shape on its back, lives only in the park?
Tiger beetle
Its whole range is about 110 square miles, all inside the park, and it lives about two and a half years.
Q 14Which two sports, done on specially designed boards, are the park's signature activities?
Sandboarding and sandsledding
Ordinary snowboards and cardboard do not slide well on the sand; the gear is rented just outside the entrance or in the nearest city.
Q 15The four-wheel-drive road past the dunes and over the mountains crosses the creek bed how many times?
Nine
The 22-mile unpaved route also includes four miles of deep sand and continues down into the Wet Mountain Valley.
Q 16Roughly how many recreational visitors did the park record in 2019?
528,000
That put it above half a million a year, still modest by national park standards.
Q 17Besides the dune field, mountain watershed and sabkha, what is the fourth part of the park's dune system?
The sand sheet
The sand sheet is the largest piece; the sabkha is a seasonally flooded wetland where minerals like baking soda cement the sand into a white crust.
Q 18What is the sabkha, one of the park's four ecosystem components?
A seasonally flooded salty wetland
Groundwater rises and falls with the seasons, leaving white alkali deposits; inland saltgrass and avocets thrive there.
Q 19Geologists named the prehistoric lake that once covered the San Luis Valley after which town?
Alamosa
Discovered from lakebed deposits in 2002, it drained catastrophically through volcanic rock at the valley's south end, likely carving the Rio Grande Gorge near Taos.
Q 20The dark patches on the dunes are deposits of which magnetic mineral eroded from the mountains?
Magnetite
It is the most magnetic mineral in nature and heavier than quartz sand, so it stays put when the wind strips lighter grains away.
Q 24Per the National Park Service, how many insect species are found only at Great Sand Dunes?
Six
They include a circus beetle, two ant-like flower beetles and still-undescribed species of clown beetle, moth and robber fly.
Q 25Over two thousand of which animal are ranched on Nature Conservancy land inside the park boundary?
Bison
The ranch property is fenced and closed to the public except on guided tours.
Q 26Which native trout swims in the park's streams?
Rio Grande cutthroat
The Rio Grande sucker and fathead minnow share the water with it.
Q 27Roughly how many bird species have been documented in the park and preserve?
Over 250
They run from white-tailed ptarmigan and rosy finches on the tundra to burrowing owls in the grasslands and avocets in the wetlands.
Q 28What is the traditional Ute phrase for the dunes, Saa waap maa nache, said to mean?
Sand that moves
The Jicarilla Apache called them Sei-anyedi, it goes up and down; the oldest human traces in the valley go back about 11,000 years.
Q 29Blanca Peak, just southeast of the dunes, is one of the four sacred mountains of which people?
Navajo
They call it Sisnaajini, White Shell Mountain; it is the highest summit of the entire Sangre de Cristo range.
Q 30How tall is Blanca Peak, the fourth-highest summit in its state?
14,351 feet
It is higher than any point in the United States east of its longitude, and two small glaciers survived on its north face until after 1903.