Carrizozo to Alamogordo, New Mexico – 27 March 2024
The drive to Alamogordo went well, with no more issues with the brakes. Our RV Park was situated alongside Walmart, which was handy. Again lovely views of surrounding mountains.
A highlight of our stay here was a visit to the White Sands National Monument, the world’s largest geologically unique gypsum dunefield. This enormous dunefield which is 176,000 acres in size, is used by astronauts in space as a geographic reference. The scenery was absolutely stunning. It was so white and dense it was like snow only not as cold. We started off with great gusto on one of the marked trails but didn’t last long as it was extremely tiring going up and down sand dunes. Jax on the other hand was in his element and just wanted to run off.
The gypsum that forms the white sands was deposited at the bottom of a shallow sea that covered the region 250 million years ago. Today rain and snow-melt from the surrounding mountains periodically fill Lake Lucero with water containing dissolved gypsum. When the lake water evaporates, small selenite crystals are formed which are then broken down by wind and water until they are fine grains of white gypsum sand and eventually dust.
Some interesting facts about the park-
* Depth of gypsum sand across the entire field is 30 ft below interdunal surface.
* The highest dunes are approx. 60 ft high.
* The dunefield has about 4.5 billion tons of gypsum sand, which is enough to fill 45 million box cars—a train long enough to circle the earth at the equator over 25 times!
* Over 300 plants, 250 birds, 50 mammals, 30 reptiles, 7 amphibians, and 1 fish species live here.
The following day we took a drive to Pistachioland, home to the largest Pistachio. We enjoyed a tasty pistachio ice cream and bought some lemon lime pistachios and pistachio brittle. Deadly!!
