White Sands National Monument

Welcome to White Sands National Monument! In the Tularosa Basin of New Mexico is a patch of land which is covered in large dunes of gypsum sand. To have that much gypsum sand is really cool, literally and figuratively!

It's literally cool because unlike the quartz-based sand which most people know about, gypsum does not efficiently turn the sun's energy into heat, so you can walk barefoot in the sand in the middle of summer without toasting your toes.

It's figuratively cool because seeing this much gypsum sand is very rare. Gypsum is water soluble, so most gypsum tends to get washed away by rains. However, here in the Tularoa Basin, there are no natural drainage paths, and so here the gypsum stays.

White Sands National Monument is located inside White Sands Missile Range, where the first atom bomb was tested at the Trinity site! They say that the sand glows at night. (No they don't, I'm just kidding about glowing sand!)


The dunes had a type of beauty which only dunes do. The sand was firm and fine. The dunes were tall. And that combination made it pretty fun to slide down! I stopped at the ranger station and picked up a rental sledding disk. It wasn't as fun as snow sledding, but I could do it in my shorts. :-)



When the rains do come, the waters pool up. The pools soak up the gypsum, but the solution has nowhere to go. So as the gypsum-saturated water dries, a type of crystallized gypsum called selenite gets formed.



Look a that beautiful selenite! Well, OK, maybe "beautiful" is a bit of a strong word, but it was still kind of neat. The selenite was a little bit rougher on my naked feet, but still better than a trek across hot pavement!



The plant life was austere, and beautiful too in a rugged kind of way!



After a fun morning of hitting the slopes of the dunes, I was hungry! Not too far away is a little town in New Mexico called Hatch. Hatch is heaven for chili pepper lovers, because they grow the best in the world! They are known throughout the world for their tasty, spicy peppers, which they celebrate every Labor Day with the Hatch Chili Festival. I just had to try some! I found this funky restaurant called the Pepper Pot for lunch.



Oh my goodness! This was the tastiest red sauce that I ever had on an enchilada! This was drink-it-straight-from-the-pot good! This was I'm-glad-I-don't-live-here-because-I-would-weigh-a-ton-from-eating-it-all-day-everyday good! This was dab-a-little-behind-your-ear-as-perfume good! This was give-me-red-sauce-instead-of-blood-transfusion good! I guess you could say that I liked it. I'll see you next time, if I can manage to leave this table... :-)

Carlsbad Caverns National Park

In the Chihuahuan Desert of the Guadalupe mountains is an amazing spectacle of nature. But you will not see it until you go down. Way down. Down. Way, way down underground. Well, maybe not that far down; the deepest point is only 1037 feet below the surface. However, this underground journey took me into a whole new world. The world of Carlsbad Caverns. I was a little cold in my shorts and t-shirt, because it was about 56 F (13.3 C) down in the caverns. However, the chill was totally worth it to see the beauty that existed below the desert surface. Water is a key component to shaping, forming, and carving many natural national treasures, and it was certainly the case here. Scientist theorize that the caverns used to be a reef of an ancient ocean 250 million years ago. The sea dried up and the reef was buried. Roughly 3 million years ago, the Earth's crust started seeing some uplift in that area, exposing the reef rock to erosion. Water seeped down through the limestone. Meanwhile, sulphide-rich water was being squeezed up from oil and gas deposits down below. The two waters mixed chemicals to create sulfuric acid, which dissolved the limestone and opened up much of the cavernous volume over time. After the caverns opened up and the sulfur-rich waters stopped oozing up from below, the cave was decorated over 500000 years with various limestone, calcite, and aragonite deposits from additional water seeping down from the ground surface up above. Today we see the result of billions and billions of drips in the form of stalactites, stalagmites, soda straws, draperies, flowstone, columns, mineral lily pads, cave pearls, popcorn, helictites, aragonite crystals, and rimstone dams. Unfortunately, I had to miss one of the premier attractions to this cave; the bat flight. From early spring to October, hundreds of thousands of Mexican Free-tailed bats leave the cave at dusk for their nocturnal insect hunt. Carlsbad Caverns was discovered by US settlers in the 1800's. Prior to the time that the caverns became a national park in 1930, the cave was mined for bat waste, known as guano, for use as fertilizer. With all those bats, you can just imagine that there was a lot of guano! Multicolor flowstone and stalagmites One of my favorites; draperies A big stalagmite and lots of soda straws on the cave roof Stalactites and stalagmites This one is called The Rock of Ages Columns, soda straws, and popcorn, oh my! The wonders of water, acid, and dissolved stone More cool draperies and flowstone

Roswell, New Mexico

In the arid lands of New Mexico is a city know as the dairy capitol of the Southwest. There is also a city that hosts one of the largest suspected government cover-ups of aliens from outer space. Would you believe they are both the same city? That city is Roswell. With all of the conspiracy hype on the internet about Roswell, and all of the documentaries produced about aliens and UFO’s which prominently featured Roswell, I expected the town to be a bit of a tourist trap; sort of like Disneyland, only Mickey would be replaced by a little green man with no ears at all. However, this was not the case at all. The overwhelming majority of the city looked much like any other small-to-mid-sized city. That is not to say that there were no touristy alien-themed boutiques and décor. At random spots throughout the town you would see little splashes of good-humored green man mythology. In the old downtown section of the city, there has been a tourist-oriented revitalization, replete with alien-eyed street lights and many Martian souvenir shops. All in all, it was a fun quick visit. The funny thing is, although it's supposed to be the dairy capitol of the Southwest, I didn't see a single cow in town, or on the way to and from town. Where did all these cows go? Maybe they were abducted by aliens!!! Sam's silly slant on the alien legend Outside one of the alien gift shops Cool alien art at the downtown theater