Framedlight

  That Wednesday was to be our last full day in southern New Mexico. As most of our family is nuts about aviation and space travel, going to the New Mexico Museum of Space History was an obvious thing to do. To get there we had to drive across the Tularosa Basin, past the White Sands Park and the Missile Range to the foothills of the Sacramento Mountains and the town of Alamogordo. As you can see it was a beautiful day and at last we were able to take our jumpers off.  Why Alamogordo in this remote corner of the US, for a space museum? Much of the early work on the space programme took place on the Missile Range and a Space Hall of Fame was established here in 1973. This was the foundation for the museum, which opened in 1976 and also has a planetarium and iMax cinema. We had our lunch in the car park looking at the view back over the Tularosa Basin to the San Andres Mountains. There are a number of artefacts to see outside the museum and we had a thorough look at them. These are sound

  Time was running out for us at White Sands. We went to the boardwalk area and watched some little animals get what they could from the hostile environment. These are a chipmunk, a clay coloured sparrow and an caterpillar who I cannot identify. Finally we went back to the Dune Nature Trail to watch the sun going down. The dunes mellowed and the sun lit up the mountains.

The Alkali Flat area of White Sands is immense but the Dunes Drive only takes you to the edge of it. We walked a small part of the marked trail between the dunes and I took some pictures of the dramatic landscape. We saw a bleached earless lizard whose colouring has changed to be lighter than that of those found in the Chihuahuan Desert. The lighter colouring reflects the heat better and helps to disguise the animal.