My 2020 Trip to New Mexico 3: White Sands NP and Cloudcroft
Good morning, afternoon, or whenever it is that you read this. This is the third and final part of my recollection from New Mexico in 2020. You can read the previous installment here. Alternatively, if you are new to the series, you can find the first part here.
I woke up a little before sunrise on my penultimate day in New Mexico. So far, I had seen two US National Parks on this trip, but a third was just on the horizon: White Sands National Park. If reaching the summit of Guadalupe Peak was the number one reason for the trip, White Sands was the number two reason. At the point I was visiting, White Sands had been a national park for around four months, having just received the designation in December of 2019. It had been a national monument since the early 1900s when commercial interests first started to consider destroying this unique land for mining, as well as to extract gypsum for the creation of plaster.
Thank goodness for conservation efforts.
Any ways, I had a three hour drive from my KOA near Carlsbad, and the first hour or so of the drive looks like this:
It is lonely. You, the road, and nothing but the horizon. These isolated desert highways are practically alien compared to the the lands to the east. About an hour or so into the drive, however, the flat terrain begins to yield to craggy hills that grow more dramatic the further you drive west. As the elevation changes, browns are gradually replaced with greens and suddenly, you are ascending into Lincoln National Forest, which meanders from the dry Chihuahuan desert landscapes, through conifer pines and up to the subalpine forests at the top of the Sacramento Mountains. Lincoln National Forest spans over 7000 feet of elevation, and you get a front row seat to all of it. After days of desert, the shift as I entered this elevation oasis was pleasantly jarring. I was instantly returned to my late high school years when my dad and I would drive up to Chicago together, and he would let me take over in Arkansas. Just look at the comparison:
I had a hotel reservation that night at The Summit Inn in the charming, mountain village of Cloudcroft. I would return that night for today my goal was White Sands National Park. I could have stayed in the much closer city of Alamogordo in the Tularosa Basin, but I love a mountain town.
Twenty minutes outside of Alamogordo, on an otherwise empty stretch of highway, stands the adobe style buildings of the White Sands National Park Visitor Center. Or, as all the signs said at the time, the White Sands National Monument. They had just received their official National Park memorabilia, but they were also selling all of their now irrelevant National Monument merchandise at heavy discount which now hangs up in my classroom.
White Sands is so named because of its stark white gypsum. White Sands is the world's largest gypsum dunefield. It also contains ancient fossils, and the world's largest collection of Ice Age footprints including what might be the oldest human footprints in North America.
A few nights of the year, White Sands NP offers Moonlight Hikes. You can also visit the Trinity Site where the first ever atomic bomb was detonated at the nearby White Sands Missile Range, but it's only open one day a year. I don't have any interest in the Trinity Site, but the moonlight hike might have to be a stop the next time I go west out of Texas. You can also sled down the dunes, which is pretty cool.
There are five trails in the park, with most of them being relatively short interpretive trails. You can really press yourself and knock out all of the trails in a single day, which is why I aimed to get there around 10. The road through the park is a large loop that the different trails all branch off of, and I was treated to the patches of dry grasses poking through gypsum - a case study of nature's stubborn will to survive.
One of the shorter trails was to the Playa Oasis, where I saw animal foot prints and the dunes reflected in shallow pools of water. There is a boardwalk one one of the other short trails, where many families with small children were. I even got to put on my teacher hat for a minute when a dad and his young son I was talking to asked what I did for a living.
The real magic of White Sand National Park is found on its two longer trails: The Backcountry Camping Trail and the Alkali Flat Trail. Here you leave the road behind as you set off into the dunes. They may be a total of 7 miles all together, but the dunes are difficult. At 5'2, I was having to scramble on my hands and knees as I climbed, my arms regularly sinking to the elbow, and my legs down to my knees as the dunes gave under my weight. There's not a lot of elevation gain, but you are hustling up and down those dunes relentlessly, and some of them are over 50 feet tall. Click here to see a picture of me looking up at the next set of dunes.
There are also tons of warnings about water and heat. I had a relatively cool day, but there's constant signage about the very real risk of death. One of the 'souvenirs' I brought back from the park was a tourist handout I received with my trail map that warned me in 8 different languages how easily I could die. Take it seriously, and don't underestimate those dunes.
Wind blew unchallenged across the dunes under the grey sky, the San Andres Mountains rising up far in the distance. The early parts of the Alkali Flat Trail were heavily populated by people playing in the smooth sand. The sand is astonishingly silky, feeling like sugar as my hands sifted through it. Some of the tourists were walking through it barefoot.
The crowds dissipated as I walked further from the trail, but I wasn't fully alone. See that little dot in the center of that picture up there? That is a hiker, and I was following him the entire trail. I had my lighter trail backpack which was full of water, and wore my longer sleeve hiking shirt, my hiking hat, so on. He was an older bald guy, walking alone through the dunes in only jeans, sneakers and a white T-shirt, equipped with nothing but a single, plastic bottle of water. The dude was with me the entire time, and we even passed by each other since it is a one-way trail. I kept my water rationed just in case I needed to share with him, but this Übermensch did just fine.
Walking through the trail felt like navigating the desert in the Ocarina of Time, following the next post so you could see the next post. Going off the trail here would almost certain lead to getting lost because it is all identical.
But I would stop and just spin around to see endless dunes of white. It was a truly unique experience.
Sweaty but happy, I drove back to Cloudcroft in the early evening to check into my hotel, The Summit Inn. The place was clean and quaint, but old; they have renovated in the past few years. The hotel was in the neighborhood overlooking the main thoroughfare, so I caught a shower and walked down into the village.
Cloudcroft has a charming downtown area and, since it was not skiing season, it wasn't too busy. The village had a few cute eateries, some souvenir shops, art galleries, and trailheads into Lincoln National Forest which I regret not snagging before I left the place. According to one of the locals I spoke to, the skiing season had ended much earlier that year, which had been a challenge for the local tourism industry.
The Village of Cloudcroft proudly declares itself as 9000 Feet Above Stress Level and I think, if I ever do another large New Mexico trip again, I would like to explore the area more. Reinvigorated after dinner, I went on a walk through the village to ogle the gorgeous trees of the forest around the neighborhoods. Cloudcroft is a small place, easy to traverse end to end by foot. My legs were tired, but I was addicted to that mountain air. I hit the limits of my energy as twilight began to give way to evening, so I returned to my hotel and got to bed early.
I set out the next morning while the day was still. I had a long drive back home, but I still wanted to journey. My wife and I were going on our honeymoon in just a few months, so I would slake my wanderlust again before too long. I bid the mountain pines farewell as I began my descent down the Sacramento Mountains. There is a pack of 'wild' horses that lives in and around Cloudcroft, and I happened to see them grazing in one of the fields nearby.
When I got back home that evening, my wife and I finished purchasing the reservations we would need for our July Honeymoon/First Anniversary in Boston, Massachusetts.
The next day, we both received an email that school would be delayed another week to 'flatten the curve' as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. We held on hope that, surely, we would be able to keep our July vacation.
As you know, that was not the case. We canceled our trip reservations in early April for full refunds, and hunkered down into quarantine. We tried to have a honeymoon that December when travel restrictions loosened, but I tore my Achilles' tendon (another story for another day) a week before we were supposed to go. We didn't get to our honeymoon (to New Orleans, another story) until nearly 3 years into our marriage - which, ironically, was paid for with the same flight credit from the canceled original honeymoon as that credit was about to expire. And I hadn't been to a National Park until my trip earlier this year.
Quarantine left a deep wound on my adventurous spirit. My blog here, with my travel stories, are my attempt to call out to my spirit in 2020 again. My recollections of Big Bend finally sent me back out West again to the place I love. I hope my recollections here will send me to explore the parks once more.
I'm by no means a fan of John Muir, who held some extremely problematic and ignorant views on race and women despite his great legacy for American conservation. However, there is one quote of his that has always resonated with me:
"The world is big and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark."
I probably have fewer years ahead of me than I do behind me now. I have many more places I want to explore yet while I can.
Thank you for reading, if you made it this far.
Bonus: I actually have a short video panoramic POV video when I was deep on the Alkali trail that you can watch here.