Framedlight

We carried on with our exploration of the White Sands and drove up to the Alkali Flat Trail. We had had a taste of the Sands, but we had not been prepared for the strangeness of this place. The dunes were higher, everything was whiter and the scale was enormous. It was a place for exploration and play. Even the car park was odd with space age picnic spots. Everything stands out in this landscape.  Here are the people related pictures from this place.

  When I was young I saw a picture of the dunes at White Sands in a book about the formation of landscapes. Ever since then I have had an ambition to go there. The site just looked so other worldly that I found it inspirational. So when I knew we were going to New Mexico this was number one on the bucket list. We drove east from Las Cruces. The road goes across the Chihuanuan desert and the Sands are situated in the Tularosa basin, a plain between the San Andres Mountains to the west and the Sacramento Mountains to the east. The whole of the White Sands area covers 275 square miles and can be seen from space. Much of the Sands are used by the US missile base and are strictly out of bounds. It was here, north of the National Park that the first atom bomb was tested on the Trinity Site. Maps courtesy of the National Park As you come in past the visitor centre nothing looks very impressive at first sight. We obtained a copy of the trail map and started with the Dune Life Nature Trail ...

  Before we left the City of Rocks we drove to a picnic site from which you could get a 360° panorama of the desert and the mountains rising on either side. Above is the view looking north over the top of Rock City towards Whitehorse Mountain and the Black Range. Also looking north there are some rounded hills. Whereas if we looked south we could see the Cooke Range which had been covered in heavy cloud all day. When we drove past it on our way home it looked much as it did on the drive out except that by now it was nearly dark When we got to Deming we stopped to take some pictures of the railway track and the locomotives. Not much seemed to be happening there on a sleepy Monday evening.