White Sands

On the Dune Trail in White Sands

We started the day by visiting White Sands National Monument. The visitor center was a beautiful adobe building with a introductory film that described how this was an unique place on earth – dunes made of white gypsum sand. Gypsum easily dissolves in water from the mountains above and settles in low spots called playa. From here the water evaporates leaving the gypsum. The wind carries it forming dunes which can move up to 30 feet per year. Most sand is made of quartz, not gypsum, which is why this is unique. In turn, that creates unique creatures, variations of lizards and rodents that are white in color to help disguise them from predators. We enjoyed our hikes through the dunes. Particularly amazing were the soap yucca, which grow fast enough to keep their leaves above the sand (reaching 40 feet in height) only to die when the dune moves past them. Similarly there are quite a few Rio Grand cottonwoods growing in the dunes. How do these water thirsty trees live here? Well there root system goes down to the clay layer where the water flow beneath the sand. As long as they can keep some leaves above the sand, they can flourish. Most of the plants and animals live in the interdunal areas between the dunes. But where the dunes are really moving quickly almost no plant life exists.
From there we headed to the White Sands Missile Base Museum. Here they test many of the armed forces missiles starting in the 1940’s till the present day. Most interesting was the video on the Trinity site, where the first atomic bomb was tested. An interesting sidelight was that they used a dynamite explosion beforehand to test all the tracking instruments, before the actual explosion. Since most of the observers were only 10 miles from the site, I hate to think how much radiation they were exposed to. Outdoors they had a sampling of many of the rockets and missiles tested there from a 1940 rocket to some of the Patriot anti-missile rockets. Most interesting was one of the contraptions that looked like a flying saucer – a method to slow the descent of a weather missile. I wonder how many people reported UFOs from that contraption.