Thursday May 6, 2010

We were on the road before 7 AM, as we want to try and capture some the dunes at White Sands National Monument with strong shadows. The strong sidelight provided by the morning sun will provide the shadows. Well, almost. Unfortunately, we had some scattered clouds and the strong sun was blocked for about an hour. Finally, we had bright blue skies and a great sun. The strong shadows were gone, but hey, you can’t have everything. We drove the dune trail, getting an overview of the park. The visitors’ center isn’t open this early, so we have to figure out some things for ourselves.

We drove into a large parking lot area and decided to turn around so we could explore the road all the way to the end and then begin backtracking. Dennis didn’t allow enough turning radius for our trusty motor home and managed to get the right front wheel stuck into the sand. Uh oh. He tries backing up. No luck. He tries rocking it. No luck. Hmmm. We both get out to survey the situation. Here we have a glorious blue sky and beaming sun looking down on us and we aren’t taking pictures; we are dealing with a stuck motor home. We put our heads together and decided we needed to dig around the wheel. We have a lot of things in our motor home but we don’t carry shovels. The best we could do was to take two frying pans we have and use them as hand shovels. That, along with my bare hands did a pretty good job of clearing the sand. Dennis gets back into the motor home as I watch the action. Saying a prayer, I watch him begin to back up. Success! Yikes, we almost had to make an embarrassing phone call to a towing company. I am sure we are not the first ones to do this, but we didn’t want to be part of the statistics.

We parked the motor home at the beginning of the Alkali Trail. We logged in at the trailhead and listed our vehicle license plate number. That must be for the park rangers at closing time. If your vehicle is still sitting in the parking lot at 9 PM and you went out on the trail at 7 AM, there might be a problem.

We climb the dunes, orient ourselves to the sun and begin walking. Every direction you turn you see another dimension of the sands. The sands are truly white. They are comprised of gypsum, unlike most sand that is made of silica. The sand is so reflective that it never gets hot like the sand at the beach. Gypsum is what drywall is made of so in some of the lower areas where moisture collects, the ground is hard like drywall. The dunes are soft and it is difficult to gain traction as you climb.

While we take pictures, we occasionally hear jets flying by us. We are very close to White Sands Missile Range. In fact White Sands Monument was closed two days ago because the missile range was doing testing.

Before we knew it, we had been at the dunes for four hours! We photographed the ripples in the sand, footprints, animal tracks, plants growing in the sand, and an orange sand fence (located near the tiny nature center building). We can imagine that without the sand fence the nature center would be buried in the sand in short order. We also found picnic tables that had unique curved roofs for protection from the sun. Dennis found a chameleon that, as chameleons do, was white.

After leaving White Sands, we head west towards Las Cruces. Our destination is Tombstone Arizona. Going to look for some “shoot ‘em ups”.
When we get to Tombstone, we take a short walk and snap some pics before we lose the sun. Tomorrow we hope to meet Wyatt Earp at the OK Corral.