White Sands National Park

In the Tularosa Basin of southern New Mexico lies the largest gypsum dune field on Earth, a white sea of roughly 275 square miles, and White Sands National Park protects about 42 per cent of it. Gypsum dissolves in water, so it rarely survives as sand; here rain and snowmelt carried it down from the surrounding mountains into the basin, where it stayed. During the last ice age a lake, Lake Otero, covered some 1,600 square miles of the basin. As it dried, the gypsum crystallised into selenite, and wind and weather have been breaking those crystals down into fine grains and piling them into dunes ever since. The park alone holds an estimated 4.5 billion short tons of this sand.

The result looks like snow and behaves like nothing else. Because gypsum reflects sunlight rather than soaking it up, the sand stays pleasantly cool underfoot on all but the hottest days, and it is fine and soft enough that sledding down the dune faces is a local tradition. The dunes rise up to 60 feet and take many shapes: domes, transverse ridges, crescent-shaped barchans and, at the edges where plants hold the sand, parabolic dunes. Those in the west, facing the prevailing wind, travel quickly; those in the east barely move. Under a low sun or a full moon the whole field turns cream, pink and then silver-blue, and the tracks of the day are wiped by the next wind.

Life here has had to adapt to the colour. At least 45 species are found nowhere else, about 40 of them moths, and several lizards, mice and insects of the basin have evolved pale or white forms that disappear against the gypsum. Plants play a different game: on the flats between the dunes, soaptree yuccas and cottonwoods bind the gypsum with their roots and can be left standing on pedestals of sand when the dunes around them move on. The dune field also preserves one of the most remarkable finds in North American archaeology: about 60 fossilised human footprints, dated to between 21,000 and 23,000 years ago, left by people walking at the edge of the vanished lake.

White Sands was protected as a national monument on 18 January 1933 and became a national park on 20 December 2019. It is surrounded by the White Sands Missile Range. From the visitor centre the Dunes Drive runs about 8 miles into the heart of the dunes; along it, the accessible Interdune Boardwalk explains the plants of the flats between dunes, and the 4.6-mile Alkali Flat Trail crosses the open dunes to the dry bed of the old lake.

Getting there

The park entrance is on U.S. Route 70, about 15 miles (24 km) south-west of Alamogordo and 52 miles (84 km) north-east of Las Cruces. The nearest airport is Las Cruces International (LRU), about 89 km away, but it has little scheduled service; most visitors fly into El Paso International (ELP) in Texas, roughly an hour and a half's drive away. There is no public transport into the park, so a car is needed.