Visited White Sands National Monument and White Sands Missile Range Museum today. It was a beautiful but windy day with excellent visability. We drove to White Sands NM on US70 from Las Cruces around mid morning. When we got to the visitor center around 11AM, the place was overflowing with families and lots of children on spring break. Who ever thought of selling those plastic disks, normally used for sledding in the snow, to sled down the sand dunes has to be making a fortune! They were selling hundreds! That gave us our first clue of what to expect in the park. We discussed the hiking possabilities with the rangers, collected our 24thPark passport stamp (were not counting our two BLM stamps since they are not NPS), viewed the exhibits, watched the park film, and purused the two gift shops before heading into the park. Leslie had not been to the park since she was a young girl and David had last been there in the early 2000s while he was supporting testing at the missile range.
The sand dunes at White Sands NM are very active. The dunes on the western edge of the park can move up to 38 feet in a year. Dunes on the east side of the park only move a few inches a year. The dunes are gypsum that has washed down from the mountains that are all the way around the Tularosa Basin that the park is located in. The rain and snow run off dissolves the gypsum in the rocks in the surrounding mountains which runs to the lowest point in the basin which is called Lucero Lake. There the water evaporates leaving selenite crystals which are very soft. The high winds from the southwest break apart the selenite crystals into flakes which break apart into fine grains as they are blown across the dry lake. The grains pile up into the dunes. Surprisingly, the dunes are only 6000-7000 years old compared to the surrounding mountains which date back to the permian period. Many of the creatures and plants that live in the park have adapted over thousands of years to survive in the desert conditions. The water table in the basin is only a few inches to a foot below the surface. The gypsum tends to absorb the moisture and draw it up into the dunes glusing the bases in place.
We knew we want to do a hike in the park. There are only 4 marked trails across the dunes. Although you can hike anywhere in the park, it is very easy to get lost in the dunes since your tracks disappear quickly. The wind was blowing 15-20MPH causing a lot of sand to go airborne. The most popular trail, the boardwalk, was closed for repair. As we drove into the park, we could see the Nature trail and Alkali Flat trail parking lots were overflowing with cars, many of the picknick areas were full with families (and children sledding down the dunes), but the parking lot for the Back Country Camping trail was pretty empty. So we hiked the two mile loop trail. Although the distance was not great, the constant up and down in soft sand turned out to be quite a good workout. The wind was picking up sand particles which were pelting us as we hiked. But it was still a beautiful hike. Part way through our hike, one of the fighter jets that launched from Holloman AFB, right next door to the NM, broke the sound barrier resulting in a double sonic boom. This was the first time Leslie had heard a sonic boom.
Following the hike we headed to the White Sands Missile Range headquarters facility where the missile museum is located. We spent a couple hours working our way through the museum which covered some of the history of the land that the missile range encompasses, including civil war battles, native american battles and leading up to the acquasition of the land by the US Government in the early days of WW2. It also had exhibits on range instrumentation and the various missiles that has been tested there over the years. The museum is not funded by the governemnt and is in need of some serious work, but it was interesting.
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| Leslie in the Dunes |
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| David in the Dunes |
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