It was a long day of driving almost 540 miles from Fort Davis to Silver City New Mexico by way of El Capitan in the Guadeloupe Mountains, up to Artesia, west through Cloudcroft to Alamogordo, White Sands, Las Cruces and Deming.
The highlight of the trip was White Sands. It was like stepping off the landing module onto another planet. The dunes are enormous and white as sugar. Once you drive back into the park, get out and start walking you begin to see the scale of it all. Some of these dunes are taller than five or six story building and they go on and on and on.
It was getting close to sunset when we arrived so we had a chance to see the sun go down behind the mountains in the distance and cast shadows across the rippling waves of sand. It was erie because there was no sound. At that time of the day the wind had stopped, we heard no birds or animals and the shape of the dunes along with the porous nature of the sand made it oddly quiet. It almost hurt it was so quiet.
We stayed out on the dunes for about an hour soaking it all in. Way off in the distance to the west the wind was kicking up huge clouds of the sand and blowing it eastward. The dunes move as much as 30 feet a year . . . so that’s a lot of sand blowing in the air. In fact, as we came down from the mountains of Cloudcroft, it looked like the valley was on fire from what looked to be smoke but was actually huge clouds of sand blowing up the valley.
We had walked over a bit towards the top of another dune and we saw in the distance upwind of us a huge cloud begin to form. In just a few minutes the wind hit us hard in the face and we beat it towards the car just before the cloud of sand hit. As we drove out of the park it looked like a snow storm with the visibility cut way down by all the sand in the air. Again, the feeling of being on another planet began to take hold.
We left White Sands and headed west toward Las Cruces, on to Deming and finally northwest to Silver City. We pulled in for the night around 10:15 our time, checked in, got a quick bite to eat and brought it back to our room to go with our refreshing adult beverage.
Tomorrow we explore the Gila Mountains and make our way north and then start heading east towards the VLA (Very Large Array) outside of Sorocco. The plan is still to get back to Dallas on Saturday and we are in good shape to make that work out nicely.
It’s just after midnight on Thursday and Dennis has hit the sack and I’m just finishing up this post. Depending on where we stay tomorrow night will determine if I get a chance for another post before getting home.
More to come . . .
Hey Mr. Educate Me Until I Explode,
Where are the pics of our Beany Baby on the trip?
Posted by: Lisa Buchanan | March 06, 2009 at 03:23 AM