On Thursday we headed about 50 miles east over the Organ Mountains to White Sands National Monument. White Sands is known worldwide as the largest gypsum dune landscape on Earth. The mountains surrounding the basin are very rich in gypsum, and when it rains this mineral is carried into the valley below. There is no river draining the basin however; it is like a bowl trapping the water. In the hot, windy dusty conditions, the water evaporates leaving behind crystalline selenite, which is very soft and brittle. The strong winds are able to break down these crystals into very fine white powdery sand, very pure and clean. The winds drift the dunes 30-40 feet per year, and many plants and animals have adapted to life in this terrain.
The NPS Visitors Center at White Sands
As you travel into the dunes, the paved road ends and you are driving on hard-packed road plowed by front end loaders through the drifting sand.
The dunes look like a moonscape against the surrounding desert.
We had to attempt the obligatory long jump over the side of the dunes, adopted from tradition at Jockey's Ridge in the Outer Banks.
360 degree Panoramic video of White Sands National Monument
Just kidding, we know we tricked you with the visual illusion!
The picture below isn't great, but this is US70 traveling back toward Las Cruces, with the Organ Mountains in the background. The Organs are very jagged, and gain their name from the resemblance to the pipes of a pipe organ.
On the way back to Las Cruces, we stopped at the other item for which the area is known, the White Sands Missile Range. The Missile Range is the largest military installation in the United States, stretching something like 70 miles wide and 250 miles long. Virtually every missile, rocket, or other explosive weapon used by the US since WWII has been tested here. They have a small museum on base and a Missile Park outside, with many of the country's most utilized ballistic weapons over the past 5+ decades on display.
One of the most remote portions of White Sands Missile Range was also the location of the Trinity Site, where the world's first atomic bomb was detonated on July 16, 1945. The atom bomb was developed as a result of the Manhattan Project just a few hundred miles north at the highly secretive Los Alamos National Laboratory. The Trinity site is available for tours just one weekend per year in early April; at our closest point we traveled on one of the nearest publicly accessible paved roads to the site and were approximately 45 miles away.
Patriot missile below...famous for shooting down so many of Saddam's Scuds.
The Beech King Air used during the late 1960's and 1970's to transport Dr. Wernher von Braun during his tenure at White Sands.
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