Sunday, April 19, 2009

WHITE SANDS NATIONAL MONUMENT

On the drive to the park, we were listening to old time radio shows, like Dragnet. That's fun, as are the commercials, when they leave them in.

This is White Sands, outside of Alamogordo, New Mexico. The sands are made of gypsum, which is made by rain washing the mineral down from the mountains. It settles in small lakes. When the lakes dry up, crystals are left. Then the wind blows and breaks up the fragile crystals and blows them into the dunes. We walked around on them for over an hour. We went barefoot and the sand is soft and cool, even tho the weather was in the high 70's.
After climbing up the dunes, we then slid and sort of walked down the dune faces. Quite a kick.



Notice we are carrying our shoes.
These 2 pictures are of sand waves. They were just beautiful and each area had different looking waves.





We left the park and decided to drive on all the way to Deming so we can go to the state park for rockhounds. We plan on staying here for 2 nites so we can get ready for our Mexico trip that starts on Tues. We need to do laundry and repack.

1 comment:

Alicia said...

I remember going to White Sands and Carlsbad as a kid. That was so fun. Looks like you two are having a great time, as usual!