After a not so short 600 mile drive from San Antonio we arrived in Las Cruces, New Mexico at about 9pm local time. In the end, it took us 5 days to get through Texas. The weather was not kind. Our hearts go out to all those people that this recent storm impacted much much worse than us. Once again we didn’t get to visit Palo Duro State Park (we were also stymied by a bad storm in October), but Palo Duro will still be there the next time we’re passing through.
Our next destination was White Sands National Park (recently upgraded from National Monument status). There is no RV camping in the park itself and because the military is fond of testing missiles in the general vicinity, there aren’t any RV parks nearby either (there’s actually not much of anything nearby). Depending on the missile test schedule, sometimes the entire park closes for short periods of time.
We ended up staying at a Walmart in Las Cruces for the night. During our research on where to spend the night we had noticed that this particular Walmart was universally rated as 5 stars, and there was absolutely no way we were going to pass up spending the night at a 5 Star Walmart. Because the parking lot backed up to a hillside, we even felt comfortable putting our slide out. Best Walmart stay ever! Although considering that our only other one was during a snowstorm in Amarillo, the bar was set low.
After awakening the next morning to the soothing sound of Walmart’s parking lot public address system informing customers about the store’s mask policy, we had breakfast and hit the road to spend a few hours at White Sands. The drive to the park took about an hour without much in the way of civilization once we drove past Las Cruces, just the occasional military installations. There were some nice sweeping vistas though.
The desert around White Sands is mostly regulation brown, but as you approach the park boundaries you start to catch peaks of the brilliantly white sand. When we finally pulled into the park we stopped at the visitor center to pick up a couple of sleds for the boys. As far as they were concerned, that was the one and only activity this park had to offer. Pro tip: if you’re planning to visit the park, and you have the space, bring your regular ole cheap plastic snow sleds, because that’s what the visitor’s center is going to sell you, at a somewhat inflated price.
As far as national parks go, this isn’t a huge one. There’s really just one road, which is paved for 5 miles. After the paved road ends, there’s a few additional miles of hard packed sand. Originally we weren’t going to subject our poor RV to the un-paved roads (Joshua Tree was brutal in that regard) but the hard packed sand road was actually pretty smooth. Not quite as nice as asphalt, but if we kept our speed to 10mph or slower, it wasn’t too bad.
The farther we drove into the park, the more and more the regular desert landscape was replaced by white sand, until eventually that was all we could see, other than the mountains in the distance. After we were completely surrounded by white sand, one thing that surprised me was that there was still vegetation growing in the sand. For some reason I thought that wouldn’t be the case, but to quote the famous mathematician Dr. Ian Malcolm, “Life, uh, finds a way”.
Our first stop after we picked up our sleds was at a boardwalk that extended out over the sand. There were also some placards going over the geological history of the park. That’s where we learned that the sand is composed of gypsum, and that White Sands is the world’s largest gypsum dune field on earth. Interestingly, the sand goes down to a depth of 30 feet and the dunes are as tall as 60 feet. For some reason I would have thought that both of those numbers would have been larger.
After the educational portion of the visit was complete we made our way to the very back of the park, where we found an empty parking lot. At that point we felt like we had a whole national park to ourselves. It was time to explore on foot and find some dunes to sled down.
At most national parks located in the desert you’re asked to stay on trails so as not to impact the micro flora and fauna, but not so at White Sands. As long as you’re not actively ripping up the plant life you can pretty much go wherever you want. One of the magical properties of this park is that by the next morning, your footsteps will have been erased by the wind, and the dunes will once again look like you were the first person to ever set foot on them. Pretty cool!
The day we visited the park it was sunny and in the high 50s, with a fairly strong wind, especially at the top of the dunes. There was even some snow buried just under the surface of the sand in some places. But after the weather we’d experience during the past week, this was all perfect for us.
After several runs down the dunes, the boys announced that this was now their favorite national park that we’ve visited (then they kept sledding for another couple of hours). That was great to hear considering how little sightseeing we’ve been able to accomplish on this cross country trip. We ended up staying at the park for about 4 hours before calling it a day. We had some pretty ambitious plans on our evening drive so the longer we stayed, the rougher out night would be. Although with that said, we all felt like we spent just the right amount of time at the park. This was a perfect way to end our not so perfect week of vacation.
