Activists dig in against oil and gas development they claim threatens the Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve and nearby water supplies

The first time Anna Lee Vargas visited the Sand Dunes, she cried. She was in kindergarten, on an end-of-the-year field trip, and had somehow lost a shoe.

“It was eaten by the creek, and I went back with only one shoe,” she remembers. “It’s out there in the abyss of many other shoes eaten by Medano Creek.”

The sixth-generation San Luis Valley native has come back to the national park every summer since, to swim in the creek flowing west out of the Sangre de Cristo mountains and walk the sandy dunes, formed by the mountains that shield the wind and the water that carries the sand back to the valley floor.

She’s continued the tradition with her young daughter — a seventh-generation native — and last year, Vargas says, the creek was so deep they could jump off one of the ledges into its cool waters.

This year, however, Medano Creek didn’t flow to the valley floor. It “trickled down” to the parking area in May, according to the National Park Service (NPS). As of mid-June, “it had retreated back into the mountains” and has been dried up four miles above the dunes since July.

And instead of her annual family trip to the sand dunes, Vargas has been on a mission to prevent oil and gas development on the other side of the mountains near the east entrance of the National Park.

I’m walking with Vargas along a sandy ridge, breathing heavily as our feet move slowly through the deep sand. We’re still relatively low, compared to some of the 750-foot-high dunes — the tallest in North America — that tower in front of us as the dramatic 14,000-foot peaks of the Sangre de Cristo mountains create a dramatic backdrop. It’s mid-July and at 9 a.m. already too hot to walk barefoot in the sand. Still, hundreds of people are hiking around us, setting up sun shades and sledding down the dunes, undeterred by both the heat and lack of water. A mixture of laughter and screams disrupts the otherwise serene landscape.

Vargas is the director of project management and community outreach at Conejos Clean Water, a grassroots nonprofit that focuses on environmental, social, economic and food justice issues in the San Luis Valley. The organization is part of a coalition of community and environmental groups working together to prevent the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) from auctioning off 11 parcels, roughly 18,000 acres, for potential oil and gas development in neighboring Huerfano County. Ten of the 11 parcels are within eight miles of the Park’s eastern boundary, Vargas says, one parcel is less than a mile away.

“From our perspective it’s just too close to our dunes, it’s too close to not be concerned,” Vargas says.

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