White Sands and Missiles

5th – 7th Dec

We left Roswell on a cold, cold morning having had to deal with our first frozen water hosepipe of the trip.  It wasn’t too much of a drama as the solution was to use water from the tank (which happily is kept liquid by the heating system) for essentials whilst the hose defrosted in the shower. We knew the deal when we made the decision to make this an Autumn/Winter trip but even the mild southern winters of the USA can get far colder than the winterless north of NZ. Throw in a few mountains, and this is going to be a shock to the system, especially as we have been avoiding winter altogether over the past few years.  

We headed west across the plains of New Mexico. This bit is enchanting, and now its name of ‘Land of Enchantment’ makes a lot more sense.  The road carved through miles and miles of empty plains, mostly devoid of any evidence of humans. West Texas was massive, but never felt as empty as this part of New Mexico. In the distance a mountain range loomed and eventually we reached it and climbed over it. There was snow at the top. There was also a tribal reservation and a petrol station with a casino. Or was it a casino with a petrol station? Not sure, but surely bizarre. We refuelled, resisted the urge to have a late morning game of roulette and descended the other side. As we were presented with the view of the huge flat Tularosa basin on the other side we had our first glimpse of the reason we have come this way. Gypsum fields or white sands. 

The nearest town to White Sands is called Alamogordo.  It appears fairly unprepossessing but surprisingly large and one could wonder why on earth it was here. All to service tourists visiting sand dunes? No. There is another fairly interesting reason. Tularosa basin is home to Holloman Airforce Base and The White Sands Missile Testing Range; a significant contribution to space innovation and exploration was made here.  The Trinity site, where the first atomic bomb was tested, is near here. The Space Shuttle landed here several times. HAM, the space chimp, was trained here.

HAM (Short for Holloman Aerospace Medical centre) was born in Cameroon, came to the USA after he was granted a green card (or stolen by poachers, one of the two,) and at 2 years of age was chosen from a group of 40 little hairy astronauts to be the first hominid to go on, and safely return from, a space flight. He was trained to do some tasks of earth, rewarded with a little banana pellet if he did them, punished with an electric shock if he didn’t, and then the space scientists compared his performance on earth to that in space. He was nearly as good in orbit, and all his vital signs were stable throughout, thus proving than humans could probably safely travel to space.  He retired after his flight and lived in a zoo in Washington DC for 17 years, and then moved to a North Carolina zoo with a colony of chimps for his last 2 years, dying in 1983 at the age of 24.  His remains returned to Alamogardo, where they are buried at the New Mexico Museum of Space History.  RIP little hairy spaceman.

We spent a couple of  hours at the aforementioned museum, which also is the serves as the International Space Hall of Fame. It was pretty interesting, had some great views over the basin, and we might have jumped at the opportunity to dress up a bit…We took this photo ourselves as we were all alone up there!

Our camp for the night was in town, but we didn’t venture out.  The next morning we headed off to the White Sands National Monument which was only about 16 miles away.  Given its proximity to the Missile Testing Range, about once a week the park road is closed for safety when they are testing.  

Brace yourselves for some physical geography facts:

This area used to be a shallow sea, which, when it retreated millions of years ago, left deep layers of gypsum, a soft mineral consisting of hydrated calcium sulphate. The mountains rose, taking the gypsum high. The water from the melting glaciers dissolved the mineral and washed it back into the basin, and rain and snow today does the same. With no outflow rivers, the water from the standing lakes evaporates, leaving the mineral in crystal form, selenite. The crystals are broken down by wind until they form a bright white sand. This gypsum sand is used in the fertiliser and building industries. Wall board, plaster of Paris, blackboard chalk and alabaster all owe their whiteness to it. In this basin the gypsum has formed the most spectacular and unworldly area of bright white dunes, protected from plunder by the National Parks Service as White Sands National Monument. 

We caught the tail end of a closure, and were first in line of the queue to get in.   The Sands are amazing with miles and miles of bright white dunes which are dotted with the occasional grasses and yucca trees.  There is plenty of wildlife here, but mainly small critters like spiders, moths, lizards and snakes.  Natural selection has hit fast-forward here as despite the dunes only being a few thousand years old, many of these animals have evolved to be very pale in colour. 

We parked up and set out on a designated loop trail. The info on the trailhead sign said that the 5km would take 3 hours because it was just up and down the dunes, following marker posts. So we didn’t do that and risked straying from the path to do our own 1 hour walk. The temperature was in the early 60 degs F and very pleasant.

This place must be unbearable in the heat of the summer, and getting lost, which would be very easy, could be quite dangerous. We didn’t see the bleached bones of any lost tourists or any wildlife, only plenty of lizard foot prints and a few fighter jets and helicopters doing military manoeuvres. We safely made it back to the carpark and had our picnic sat atop a dune, looking at the mountains. Not a bad lunch spot.

We rolled on across the plains of the basin and crossed another small mountain range to our next stop, Las Cruses. This is a sprawling desert town straddling the I-10 interstate. Named for some crosses erected to commemorate a band of travellers who were attacked and killed in this area in the 18th C, it is now a medium sized town, home to many who work in the nearby military facilities.  It has a couple of historic areas and our camp for the night was within a short walk of one of them, Mesilla. This had a cute little square and we found a cool locals bar for a drink then had an enormous plate of Mexican food each at a nearby restaurant.

Despite going out completely unprepared we managed to be entirely unaffected by a strange and unusual event than happened during our evening out. It rained. Really hard. After weeks and weeks of travelling through desert and battling dust and dry skin, the heavens opened and it poured. Happily we managed to get home between downpours and stayed completely dry.  This weather was the start of our exposure to the wintery storm that was to crash across the more northern and eastern states, bringing plenty of snow to those areas, but only a few hours of rain to us.  This continued the next day as we did a long day of driving to leave New Mexico and to our next state, Arizona. Pretty miserable conditions on the highway, but we plodded along and arrived at our next stop, the town of Tombstone, safely.