The bad news is that the road was so freaking boring.
This was the road for 8 hours
We did see some cool things. I think I was more excited than Julia.
We saw the western Continental Divide:
This is always a cool thing to see. The sign says
The Continental Divide
Elevation: 7245 ft.
Rainfall divides at this point. To the west, it drains into the Pacific Ocean, to the east, into the Atlantic.
The Trinity Site, where the first atomic bomb was dropped:
The sign says:
The nuclear age began with the detonation of world's first atomic bomb at the Trinity Site on July 16, 1945. The site may have been named Trinity by J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Los Alamos Nuclear Physics Laboratory, who said at the blast, "Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds," quoting from the Bhagavad Gita. The detonation of the bombed marked the culmination of the Manhattan Project.
The Trinity Site made me feel weird. I fully understood the magnitude of what happened on that site and the ramifications of what came of that project. We drove through Billy The Kid Country (seriously, that's what the sign said). Appropriately, Billy Joel's "The Ballad of Billy the Kid" came on the radio right as we were driving through.
We got to Alamagordo, New Mexico around 5:00pm and met up with my mom. Immediately, we got in the car and headed to White Sands National Monument.
White Sands is located in Tularosa Basin in New Mexico. The sand is made of gypsum. The dunes here are so rare because gypsum is water soluble, so it would be carried out to sea. The Tularosa Basin has no outlet to the sea. The gypsum from the mountains is eroded by rainwater and carried down to the basin. The water then either sinks into the ground or evaporates, leaving gypsum crystals. The crystals are eroded by the wind to form powder fine sand. White Sands National Monument is the largest place on earth of this natural phenomenon. There are 2 sister dunes, but they are teeny compared to New Mexico.
The dunes are ever reshaping themselves. They move 1-3 feet per year covering everything in their path. The national park service encourages people to play in the sand since it really isn't hurting anything. You can buy sleds in the gift shop and go sledding down the dunes. We didn't sled, but Julia and I had fun climbing up and down the dunes. Mom didn't get as into it as we did, but she still had fun with us.
People Sledding Down the Dunes
Julia Rolling Down the Dunes
The dunes were so beautiful with the blue sky, and as the sun set, the shadows grew and were amazing. We went on a nature walk with one of the rangers and learned a lot about the ecology of the dunes. I'll let the pictures speak for themselves.
Julia Made Sand Angels
Mom On Top Of The Dunes
Ta-Da!
Awwwww....
Julia and Me
Julia Sliding
Me, trying not to fall...
Beautiful Light
Our nature walk taught us some really interesting things:
This is a gypsum crystal....
This plant has adapted so that the dunes can cover the plant and it can still live. As long as the dune doesn't completely cover the plant, it will survive.
This is a tree that has adapted to the harsh environment of the dunes...
Finally, we caught the sunset. It was gorgeous!
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