SURVIVING A NIGHT IN AMERICA'S LARGEST SAND DUNES (crazy sand storm)

This is crazy.

10% chance of rain, they said.

Wow. It's very rare that bears and mountain lions make their way into the sand dunes 300 yards from where we slept last night. And look at this. Cat tracks. I think that has to be a mountain lion.

We are Karen Nate, and we spent the last four years traveling to 100 countries.

But 2020 brought us back to the US where we bought a converted sprinter van to explore our home country.

Yay.

We started the summer by driving 1400 miles across the country to Colorado. And five weeks later, we are still here. We cannot get enough of this beautiful stay in its endless adventures.

I can't believe.

I can't believe we did. One of our favorite things about having a home wheels is finding beautiful and unique places to stay. But tonight we're saying goodbye to the van and getting a little uncomfortable for a once in a lifetime experience.

Wish us luck.

Oh. A little cold at 8,000ft this morning.

So we are about 20 minutes outside of Great Sand Dunes national park, and the visitor center is about to open. We're going to try to be one of the first ones there because every day they give out a limited number of backcountry permits that allow you to go sleep in the sand dunes. They're first come, first serve. So.

Great. Thank you so much.

Can you tell how big I'm smiling underneath this buff? We got the permit. Tonight we are sleeping in the dunes. I think this is gonna be one of the most unique experiences we've ever had. The only issue now is we don't have a tent.

So it turned out finding a tent was a lot harder than I thought it was be to going going to be. We ended up driving 45 minutes to the nearest town. We went to two sporting good stores, two Walmarts, and no one had backpacking tents. Walmart had shelves on top of shelves that should have had tents on them, but the only thing left were the steaks.

This is a tent. This is a tent tent. So we've come up with another solution that I actually think is going to be more fun, but we'll share that with you tonight when we set up camp.

So we have enough stuff to, like, be safe, but we don't actually have backpacking stuff. This sleeping bag was just kind of like our backup plan in case it got really cold in the van. And now I'm just trying. Look.

Oh, man. It's just not going to be comfortable to carry out there. I don't know what we're going to.

All right, so the plan is to hike four miles into these massive sand dunes. Because somewhere in this vastness lies the tallest sand dune in all of North America. So the goal is to camp somewhere nearby tonight so we can sit on top and watch the sunset.

We have a long journey to get there, though.

With that said, we have heard that this is a very strenuous hike. Normally, I wouldn't be worried about anything that's eight miles round trip, but we have four miles through nothing but sand, and we start by climbing this gigantic dip.

I feel like that does no justice to how big this thing actually is.

I'm already out of breath. And we're not even to the incline yet, Walking on flat sand.

Right now we are at 8,000ft, so we're breathing hard. We'll blame it on that. Yeah.

Okay. I think it's a little less windy. I'm going to attempt to tell you a story while climbing the sand dune. This. This actually isn't Kara and I's first time here. We were here six years ago, before we ever started this YouTube channel. We were at a wedding in New Mexico, and we drove up here for the day to go sandboarding. And I believe it was the first time we ever filmed, edited, and published a video to YouTube.

I tried to get really creative and in the first half, make it look like we were really good and then reveal all of our crashes. In the second half.

It's just cool to be able to look back on a moment when we're standing in the exact same place and realize just how much we've changed, how much our lives have changed, and knowing that if we would have never just started doing that for fun, like filming our travels, not for anybody to watch, but just to have them as memories, we would have never gotten to this point. And even though I'm breathing really hard and I'm really hot, just feeling so grateful right now, I don't remember being.

This tired last time. I think these things have grown.

I think we've officially conquered the hardest part of this hike. First mile and a half is basically straight up to the top of this dune, which is appropriately named High dune. So if you're standing in the parking lot and looking out, this one looks like it's the tallest, but it's not. We still have two and a half miles to go.

So if you look like right when everything starts to turn green, that's the parking lot we came from. And all the little black dots you see out there, those are people.

This is crazy. I think that's star, dude. I Think that's the tallest dude in North America right there?

As it turned out, this challenge was nowhere close to being over.

I think we were the only ones crazy enough to venture past the first set of dunes because we walked for the rest of the day without seeing another soul.

Due to the shifting sands, there's no set trail. So we did our best to find the path of least resistance through the dunes.

But what looked like gentle, rolling hills in the distance turned out to be incredibly steep, giant mountains of sand.

Several of them became too steep to climb, so we ended up having to navigate our way across the side of them. It took an insane amount of effort just to keep myself from sliding down the dunes.

As my boots slid in the sand, every single step only took me half as far as I hoped to go.

The unrelenting afternoon wind only compounded my discomfort.

It filled my eyes, mouth, and ears with sand.

My eyes burned to the point where I could barely keep them open, and I could feel sand crunching between my teeth. So while my legs ached and all I wanted to do was sit down, there was another part of me that wanted to find relief from the wind as soon and as fast as possible.

Good work.

I don't know what I would have done if I didn't have your footsteps to follow. That was the only thing that I was focusing on.

This may sound like a miserable experience, and in some ways it was. But there was also beauty and excitement in it. A rough, rugged excitement that came from pushing ourselves through something uncomfortable.

And a beauty of experiencing such an extreme environment that was slightly out of our control.

All right, this is the final push to the summit of the tallest sand dune in all of Montana.

Ah, the peak. The first mile and a half was not the hardest part, but wow. We did it.

We made it. I didn't think we could make it.

Your face.

That guy with sand left so much sand.

Proud of you once again. Keep surprising me. Oh, my gosh, you're so tasty.

Well, we forgot our normal celebratory stickers, but we got M and M's almost as cool.

Doesn't feel the same, though.

Also, we cannot see anyone. Any direction that we look right now, we are the only ones up here, and it feels like we're the only ones in all of the sand dunes.

Lynn's picking back up. We're gonna see if we can head down, try to find somewhere to camp for the night.

It's raining, still super windy. Already starting to get a little chilly. We're at 8,000ft, and I don't really think we're prepared to spend the night in these conditions. As much as I really, really want to spend the night out here, as much as I really, really feel like I'm letting you down. Before. Think we want to be heading back to the van. Watched our past videos.

I usually want to make smart decisions. Maybe I'm learning.

That's wet.

10% chance of rain, they said.

Wow.

It's. It's about 10 minutes later. Perfectly blue skies. We're already dry. We found this nice, beautiful spot out of the wind, and I think this is home for the night. Maybe I haven't learned my lesson after all.

With that said, we just. We went through worst case scenario, and that's that it rains on us tonight, we have a pretty miserable night, and we have to pack everything up and hike out in the dark. Which, it's pretty straightforward from here.

Way less scary than Longs Peak in the dark.

Not ideal, but like, I also think something that shouldn't stop us from having this experience.

Okay, so Nate bought this emergency shelter at Walmart, and the plan is.

Perfect.

And the plan was to sleep in it like a cocoon, Kind of like the bivvy bags that we slept on a glacier in in Antarctica. We figured if a bivvy was good enough for Antarctica, it was probably good enough for the sand dunes, too. Problem is, it's quite loud, which isn't a huge deal, but technically we are in the quietest location in all of the lower 48 United States. So it would just be such a shame if this is what we heard all night instead of the complete silence.

Also, you kind of look like a burrito.

So the plan is to sleep with it like a ground cover. We're going to stuff it underneath the sleeping bag so we don't have to hear it all night. But we know that if it rains, we can cover ourselves up and we'll have some shelter.

I think this is going to be great. I'm not saying I'm going to sleep good. The sand's a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. I thought it was going to be at the beach, but more like laying on a piece of plywood. But it doesn't really matter if we sleep. That's not the point. This is going to be a very memorable experience.

So we're eating dinner a good ways away from where we're sleeping tonight. Because this morning when I went to get the permit, the ranger said it's very rare that bears and mountain lions make their way into the sand dune. But just to be safe, we're eating far away from our camp, and we're storing our food far away from our camp. Dinner tonight consisted of Triscuits and a bag of beef jerky. We had brought tuna fish and crackers, thinking that was like a nice, easy backpacking meal. And then as soon as I went to open it, I was like, what do cats eat? Fish. What do bears eat? Fish. And I got too scared to open.

It, and I just thought it was the perfect to go meal and ate one of those.

How much better are you gonna sleep tonight knowing that your hands don't smell like the predator's favorite food?

This is not much of a pillow.

It's nice and quiet. The wind is relatively calm. The temperature is perfect for getting in a sleeping bag. The stars are just starting to come out, and so far, I'm very happy with the decision that we've made. With that said, there's a chance this will be the worst night of sleep that I've ever had.

The sand is surprisingly hard.

Wish us luck.

Good night.

Hey.

The ground is so hard.

It didn't rain, but it did get so cold, and there were these little bugs that kept landing on my face. So I slept most of the night.

Like that. And then I had to sleep on my side until it started hurting. Then I moved to my back, and then it would start hurting. I moved to my other side.

And I think I just did that like hundreds of times.

What are you doing?

Just getting a knife out just in case I'm scared. 300 yards from where we slept last night. And look at this. Cat tracks. The back, pad the toes.

And look. That's like.

I think that has to be a mountain lion. There's no way we would have slept out here last night if I would have seen these before we went to sleep. The good news is I feel like it would be pretty challenging to stalk us in wide open sand. But either way, I'm carrying the camera out in one hand and a knife in the other.

Just for scale. Does anybody know what kind of tracks these are? They go in twos. They're about a normal human's step.

Ice cold water.

Oh, my gosh.

I don't know if I can do it.

You gotta do it. No, you gotta do it.

All right. Yeah, I just gotta go in. Iceman Hoff.

Oh, I'm so cold. Oh, my gosh. You. All you gotta do is about 10 times longer.

Take my breath away. Oh, my head.

I have brain freeze.

Oh, my God.

No. Oh. Oh, it was almost gone forever. It almost went up there.

I literally can't open my eyes.

So much sand is just caked everywhere.

I think just as bad as mine, but yes.

Just been trying not to row up.

I just fell.

Didn't hurt too bad. Just glad I didn't roll all the way down. He looks so epic.

Yeah.

Yeah do right now.

I don't know. Do we want to try to find sleeping mag inside of this?

Yeah, I guess so.

Like, is this going to be miserable? Probably. What?

Probably. I think it's worth trying.

We made it. I made the coffee this morning.

Thanks.

We slept in the middle of the sand dunes all alone.

With all of the sand flies on the freezing cold hard ground.

That may not be the right word for what I did last night. We rolled around inside of a sleeping bag on the sand.

It was worth it.

Before you go, don't forget to check out the link in the description. It's omaze.com Karen Nate, for your chance to win the customized 4x4 Sprinter Man.