
In the late 1940s, Katherine and Conrad Dunagan of Monahans were inspired by Texas writer Roy Bedichek’s Adventures with a Texas Naturalist (1947) to preserve some 3,400 privately owned acres in the Monahans Sandhills area (at the southeast tip of a dune field that stretches 200 miles northwest into New Mexico). Their attempts to have it designated a national park failed, but they succeeded in having it become a state park in 1957. The dunes in the area, some up to seventy feet tall, are still “active,” growing and changing shape in response to wind and weather. The Dunagan Visitor Center is a single-story building framed in long concrete beams, measuring 40 x 95 feet and raised on concrete columns for a view of the park.