White Sands, NM

We made a stop at White Sands National Monument on our way back from Arizona a couple weeks ago. I remember going there once as a kid while on vacation. I told Larry since we were going to drive right through it, we might as well stop and take a look. He had never been to the area and we will most likely never be back that way anytime soon. Here are some pictures from our brief visit there.

A little history about White Sands taken from the brochure I picked up.

At the northern end of the Chihauhuan Desert lies a mountain-ringed valley, the Tularosa Basin. Rising from the heart of this basin is one of the world's great natural wonders--the glistening white sands of New Mexico. Great wave-like dunes of gypsum sand have engulfed 275 square miles of desert here and created the largest gypsum dune field in the world. The dunes, brilliant and white, are ever changing. They grow, crest, then slump but always advance. Slowly but relentlessly the sand, driven by strong southwest winds, covers everything in its path. Within the extremely harsh environment of the dune field, even plants and animals adapted to desert conditions struggle to survive. Only a few species of plants grow rapidly enough to survive burial by the moving dunes, but several types of small animals have evolved white colorations to camouflage them in the gypsum sand.