Day 16 –White Sands National Monument

We went to White Sands National Park this morning.  We left early, because we know that we spend more time than normal to hike around and other stuff.  Here’s Carmen at the visitor’s center before we began driving in the park. 

The visitor’s buildings are all in the Spanish adobe style.  I like these buildings, they are so nice.

We are beginning to enter the sand dunes and you can see them in the near distance.

There are all kinds of tracks around the dunes, if you look for them. 

Carmen on one of the dune trails we were walking on.  You can see one of the placards right behind Carmen.

More of the dune trail we are walking along.

Some of the trees and bushes we have seen in the dunes.  This tree is dead, but there were some that were alive.

The dune grasses looked like they were flowering and beginning to go to seed.  They looked too good to ignore.

Some of the flowers are pretty amazing. 

This grove of trees is in the middle of the sand dunes.  As the sand gets higher around the tree, it will kill the tree.

Almost at the end of the trail we came to this higher dune.  Here I am jumping, as best I can, off of the top of this dune.

Back on the road, we had to stop and take a picture of the sand spilling over onto the road.  It looks like a snow drift after being plowed.

The paved road ended and the “sand” road started.  When we got out the road looks like an ice road, with the cracks and transparency.

Even though I’ve been looking for a horned lizard, I only saw some tracks.  Alas even though I was looking, no Tarantulas today, only a lone beetle.  Check out this beetle I found walking around the dunes. 

Looks like a mountain range, but it is only sand!

We stopped on the side of the road and climbed one of the dunes, this one about 250 feet high.  Looking out from the top of the dune you can see the expanse of the dunes.  You can see my car on the left side of the picture.

We parked at the Alkali Flats trail, a 5 mile round trip.  The hike goes through the Gypsum Dunes and ends at the Alkali Flats.  There really are no markers, or if there are, they are too few, so to make Carmen comfortable, I took a picture of our sneaker prints so we could follow our tracks back.

The dunes are endless and after hiking for about a half hour we had this view.

Wow!  Carmen and I walked all over the dunes and had enough of walking on sand and were getting ready to head back until saw some people sliding down the dunes.  When they asked if we wanted to try, we borrowed a snow (ah, sorry, sand) saucer to slide down the sand dunes.  Fantastic!  The sand is so soft, almost like a powder.  I should point out that doing down was easy, getting back up in the soft sand, not so much.

I had to Jump another dune again.  The sand is so soft; you can’t get good purchase for a good jump.

Finally, after returning to the visitor’s center to use the facilities, I found a lizard.  There were all kinds of tracks in the sand, but no lizard.  Now I find it.

  

Leaving White Sands Dunes National Monument we headed to the US Army Missile Museum.  Here are some of the mountains we passed on our way.  

The only problem, when we got to the US Army Missile Museum they had closed it down because of a possible collapse of one of the rockets.  Whether that is true or not makes no difference, we didn’t get to go inside.  We couldn’t take pictures from outside the gate and they would not let us in. 

As we were driving back, we passed this flatbed, from Quebec, with these two aircraft wings.

We are now on our way to the Three Rivers Petroglyphs Site, which we’ll set as its own blog post.