Ch 6 - New Mexico

Chapter 6

New Mexico

White Sands, Alamagordo, and eastern high country. Feb 4 – 8

There is lots about the desert we like - sunny days and starry nights, beautiful rock formations, amazing cacti and wide-open vistas. There's lots we don't like too – thorns, scorpions, rattlers (hibernating now), dust, cold nights, and the rather scarce greenery that is is more accurately 'greynery'. In fairness, it is mid-winter and we can see that at certain times the vegetation could be beautiful. But one thing is inescapable, there is lots and lots of desert out there, and not much of it supports human occupation. Leaving the marvelous caves of Kartchner, we rejoined I-10, pointed east, set the cruise, and relaxed the miles away. Not being on any tight schedule, we are at liberty to stop wherever we see an attractive piece of topography or recognised “roadside attraction”. We do a bit of planning the night before driving, but as often as not the spot we chose to spend the next night turns out to be not so nice in the harsh light of Jake's opinion. He hates getting thorns in his paws, you know. Careful planning then morphs into a dynamic system that relies on our flexibility and belief that anything will do for one night. So it was that after coming into one dusty unappealing town after another, we opted for the longer drive well into New Mexico and ended up at a good truck-stop at Las Cruces, which turned out to be very suitable. This town lies on the eastern edge of a big flat desert and is up against a spectacular mountain range. We at one point had been tempted to go north from there to the ballooning capital of Albuquerque to satisfy another romantic urge, but it was snowing there so that made for an easy decision. Next morning we climbed the spectacular Organ mountains and once at the summit were rewarded with a commanding view of the Tularosa Valley and the next set of mountains on its far side. Coasting down to the valley floor, we passed the White Sands missile range headquarters, which was unexpected. Trying to maintain some element of surprise on this trip and holding to the maxim of “no surprise, no adventure”, we don't hunt down too many details of our route on the internet, where every conceivable attraction is written up. By the time I had realized that there was a museum full of big boy missile toys, we had already rocketed past down the hill, and its hard to get a girl's agreement to turn around and go uphill to something which would bore her to tears. Next time!

In the centre of this wide valley lies the amazing White Sands, and the National Park Service has made them accessible to us. We drove in through the gates on a paved road that soon became snow-white, through sand dunes that became less and less covered with vegetation and soon were towering over us on either side. The prevailing southwest winds are steadily moving the mounds of white powder – drywall dust actually, but a bit coarser. Imagine the images of Arabian desert dunes, then colour them brilliant snow-white. After a windy day, snowplows come to push it off the road.  It is wild! Plants take root in the leeward depressions between the mounds and are gradually buried as the dune advances. The yucca plant there does manage to adapt to its changing environment by growing longer roots to keep its head above the sand, but when the dune moves on, the long root can't hold it up and it keels over and dies. There are a few critters there, which have become white in colour to blend in – a mouse, a lizard, two types of rabbit, various beetles, but they are mostly all nocturnal, so you only see their tracks. The hawks should probably wear sunglasses. In the deepest region where there is very little vegetation, everything is blinding white and you are sure you should be freezing cold. Its a huge area and very special – the only occurrence of this phenomenon on Earth. Visitors are welcome to wander at large over the dunes, as their footprints will be erased with the next windy day. We were told that it is clearly identifiable from space and we felt privileged to picnic there!

We ended up the day at a small RV park at Alamagordo that we found through our Passport America discount directory. Friendly John the proprietor had built the park and his adjacent house after he retired from his career as a rocket warrior. Well, the electronics communications part of them anyway. Just when I was feeling sorry for missing the missiles earlier in the day, here was a guy who knew all about them. The white sands range is much bigger than the actual dunes area and takes up almost the whole width of the huge valley and is about 120 miles long. I guess the early missiles, starting with captured V2s, were somewhat unguided so they needed lots of elbow room. They detonated the first A-bomb in 1945 at the northern end of the range – the Trinity site. Also found in Alamagordo is a big air force base that has lots of cloak and dagger stuff going on in addition to having the super-long alternate landing strip for the space shuttles, one of which landed and kicked up so much dune-dust that they scrapped that idea. One of their Top Guns went zooming over and turned our brave hound into a trembling wimp with its double sonic-boom. We spent a day doing laundry and catching up on correspondence, as we hadn't seen any wi-fi for awhile. Writing this stuff takes some time too, and its easy to fall behind.

There was one other attraction in the area for us to explore, and that was the Space Exploration museum. It was probably built in the 70s and poorly funded ever since, but it was a very good exhibit nonetheless. They had lots of real missiles outside, and rocket engines to examine inside, so the boy in me got his fun after all. We also enjoyed the Everest movie in the oldest and smallest Imax in North America. The stereotypical nerd running the machinery was pining for a modern digital upgrade and described for us some early cinematographical landmarks as if they were relics of the Greeks. Hey, we remember Todd-A-O and Cinemascope with the stitched images! And all those magical moon rockets that held us spellbound as kids are now in a museum. That was complicated stuff, and now its No Good. Man, this ageing thing sure takes courage!

All in all, we liked what we saw of New Mexico and found the people very relaxed and friendly. They are all descended from Aliens of course, what with Roswell and Area 51 being in the state, plus all the modern space travel and nuclear research going on, but that's OK with us. We'll come back for a closer look some other year. There is a very tall set of mountains for us to drag our little home over tomorrow, so we had better rest up for it. We're heading for Texas next, so please join us. Good night.