2012/06 Western USA trip - White Sands |
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Dear All,
At the end of Part 3 we had just left Arizona through Apache Pass. We had ten days to get to Michael and Lauren’s wedding in Steamboat Springs and we planned to visit Carlsbad Caverns in southeast New Mexico and then make our way north to Colorado.
Tuesday June 19th
As we descended from Apache Pass, the road improved, now blacktopped, and we were driving through orchards of nut trees, macadamia and pecan we thought. We were now up to our customary 100F as we rejoined I-10 for a somewhat boring trip east across New Mexico, mostly flat desert with distant hills. In the past we’ve broken the journey by stopping at Deming for Rockhound state park, one of the few parks where you can legally whack at big rocks looking for interesting little rocks, but it wasn’t really the weather for that. Nor did we have our whacking tools.
By midafternoon we were at Las Cruces, which means “the crossroads”, and we did just that, crossing to the road that heads north to Alamagordo. This goes through the White Sands Missile Range, where the military shoots off its rockets, hoping that they’ll go where they are supposed to. We were hopeful too.
The valley is another of those closed systems with no outlet river, sometimes having shallow alkali lakes but mostly dried-up flat white desert with minimal vegetation, useful if you’re looking for bits of a missing missile.
Partway across the valley we were diverted into a large building where we were interviewed by Homeland Security. This checkpoint is presumably meant to catch the vans full of Mexicans on their way from the border to American cities. Or perhaps they are looking for little green men who’ve mislaid their space ship. In this case, they’d caught four aliens, three Brits and a Canuck. We all needed to produce passports to prove that we were there legally.
Just past Homeland Security was the White Sands National Monument. It was so hot I was considering passing the park by and coming back in the morning, but it was likely that the campground would be just as hot, so we thought we’d give it a try. Our first visit was to the air conditioned visitor centre to find out why the sand dunes were there.
The whole process began with a dried-up sea which left a big deposit of gypsum. This eventually got scrunched up into a mountain which ever since has been eroded by rain, depositing gypsum into the valley. The wind picks up the gypsum grains and blows them into dunes, which are steadily advancing 
across the valley at about two yards a year. Eventually, in about 20,000 years, they’ll pile up against the Sacramento Mountains.
You’d think nothing would grow under those conditions. Some plants just die when the dunes cover them, but others like these yuccas just grow taller to stay above the dune. Of course when the dune passes by, maybe twenty years later. the plant can’t support its own weight and it falls over.
The road into the park skirts the dunes at the beginning but then there are sections that have been covered and have to be ploughed out regularly. These look just like a Minnesota winter scene with banks of white on either side of what appears to be a white icy road. Our only clue was that it wasn’t -30 outside.
Sandie wasn’t risking a burn but the rest of us climbed up and onto one of the dunes and walked the trail. The gypsum, being white, is cooler than regular sand would be and much softer, just like you’d expect for powdered sheetrock. We could see little patterns where animals had left their tracks, particularly around the surviving plants. Most animals are nocturnal but we found this little lizard. The trail visited some of the bare patches between the dunes so there were lots of ups and downs.
John and Edna retreated when the heat got to them but I plodded around the whole trail. I was surprised to find that cottonwoods survived 
there. Normally they are thirsty riverside trees. I also found these odd tracks, probably from a sidewinder rattlesnake. After an hour or so my eyes were aching and I imagine that you can get snow blindness in time. On the lee side some of the dunes are almost vertical. Teenagers were diving down some of these but I didn’t try it, just slid down as upright as I could.
As we drove into the interior of the dune field we were passed by a couple of dozen big identical vans, no markings, no insignia. When we caught up with them there were hundreds of young people gathering on top of the dunes. Nothing wrong with that of course; it just seemed a little odd. But then a lot of X-files episodes took place in New Mexico! The weird thing in the foreground is a picnic table with a sunshade. There were other family parties out in the park too, with kids sledding down the dunes. We were too chicken to try it.