Our outdoor thermometer said it was 24°F (-4°C) when I got out of bed around 7:20. Yahoo! Weather said it was -1°F (-18°C) in nearby Alamosa at 7:00! I think that confirms that our thermometer reads high when it's cold out. I did some computer work.

I had lunch around 12:20, then worked up a blog entry. I did some more computer work. We left in the Jeep around 3:15.

We went to the Visitor Center to check out the photo books to get ideas. We also talked with the ranger, and he said it was a very dry winter, and the mountains looked more like they usually do in May than in January because there's not much snow on them. We left around 3:45 and went ...

To nearby San Luis Lake State Park around 4:00. The lake was frozen and there was no waterfowl, so we just turned around and went back ...

To Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve. We stopped along the road before the entrance station so J could head out into the grassland to try to get some mule deer in the foreground of her images of the sand dunes. I walked along the road until I found a nice composition, then waited for some nice color to appear on the clouds. Fortunately, I had taken some images, like the one to the left, before the clouds lit up, because the clouds never lit up — the cloud bank to the west interfered too much. :(

We returned to the RV around 5:25. I downloaded the images I took and started making dinner.

We had dinner around 5:55 of Bertolli Italian Sausage & Rigatoni (one of our favorites) and leftover garlic bread sticks.
After dinner, I did some more computer work, then downselected images from today and processed one for the blog. Then I worked up a blog entry.