the white sands of New Mexico

When you're in the south it is good to sample pit BBQ somewhere, and we did last night at a place called Can't Stop Smoking in Alamagordo.  This is terrific but not very healthy meat, but when you only enjoy it once in a while you can get by with it.  Actually we got turned around somewhere around Las Cruces as we left Alamagordo and drove by a big smoker parked alongside the road at a gas station, smells and tastes so loud it was hard to keep driving.

Anyway, the big part of the day was a couple hours spent in the White Sands National Monument, 275 square miles of white gypsum sand, just like you see here.

We were standing pretty much at the base of the 60-foot dunes, about 80 yards or so from the road that snakes through the park, which is itself the monument.  The mountains all around have gypsum in the stones and soil, and the snow melt carries it into the basin.  When the water disappears, which it will do in a desert, it leaves only the gypsum in flakes the size of corn flakes.  Then the spring winds blow across the flakes, gradually tumbling them into smaller and smaller pieces.

The gypsum sand gets blown uphill, but not really into the air, and when it reaches the top of a dune it tumbles down the far side, an ongoing process that means the dunes will literally move up to 30-32 feet per year in some locations.  Plants that get in the way have to adapt.  Yucca plants do so by extending their core stem, which causes them to die when the sand moves past because the plant cannot support itself.  Another plant grows atop its own stand created by its roots and some hardened gypsum.  Animals will find shelter inside because it will be 30 degrees warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer.

Listen to the wind in this video:

Driving through the park is pretty much like driving around at home in the wintertime when there is a storm going on - the sand is constantly blowing onto the highway, to the point that the Monument has a crew that will probably be plowing the sand daily during the windy season.  Just a beautiful geological formation developed somewhere in the last 4,000 to 7,000 years.  Geologically speaking that's like yesterday, according to the film we watched.  Thank goodness for folks like Teddy Roosevelt who had enough sense to protect these natural wonders.