Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve, Colorado, USA

What a long, magnificent trip it’s been! We started our summer road trip in the oldest of our national parks, Yellowstone, and now we’re ending it in one of the newest: Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve, established in 2004. It’s the national park that most of you voted for in our poll to decide where to end our road trip, and it’s a fitting place to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service, which was founded on this day in 1916. Congratulations, NPS, and here’s to the next 100 years!

In all, we visited 13 national parks this summer, each one uniquely beautiful, inspiring, and full of surprises. But we can’t help thinking about all the places we didn’t get to. After all, the US National Park Service oversees 59 national parks, as well as hundreds of other ‘units’ like historical parks, national monuments, and national memorials. Where should we explore on our next journey? Let us know on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, where we've been posting regular updates on our national parks road trip.

But first, let’s consider our present surroundings. The 750-foot (and higher) sand dunes here are an awe-inspiring and unexpected feature of Colorado’s topography. And yet the towering hills of sand are just one feature of a patchwork landscape that also includes conifer forests, alpine lakes, and wetlands. The 85,000-acre park and preserve even encompasses stretches of tundra at the higher elevations, where it edges up against the base of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. It’s a magnificent setting for the final leg of our road trip as we consider the bittersweet reality that all things—even national parks road trips—come to an end. For now.