After spending Monday in El Paso, TX helping our friends Jake and Melissa move, we moved on to a quiet little park in Alamogordo, NM. For the second week in a row, New Mexico has delivered the goods. It’s lovely here.
A beautiful sunset from atop the RV:
…and a beautiful sunrise from atop a nearby mountain the next morning. Before work and school started, Amy and I took a quick morning hike. Note how our campground below is in the shadow of the mountain even though it’s well after sunup.
That shadow creates a very unusual sunrise experience down at the campground. It seriously feels like the sun gets switched on like a light every morning. I timed it:
Fruit smoothies were a breakfast staple for us before this RV trip, but we unfortunately didn’t bring our blender with us. Melissa (the one we helped move) kindly donated her blender to us, so fruit smoothies are back!
There was some CRAZY wind midweek that stirred up the Tularosa Basin that our campground overlooks (White Sands, off in the distance, looked like a huge cloud rising up from the ground.) It made for an eerily beautiful sunset:
The next evening was much clearer, so we did a family hike up the same trail Amy and I took a few days earlier:
Towards the end of the week, the electrical box at our camping spot fizzled — not good on a 90-degree workday.
This worked out for our benefit, as we were able to upgrade to an unused “campground host” spot, which had one of the few sewer connections in the campground. (Our previous spot had no sewer connection, and that was causing some serious concern since the community dumping station was out of order. Our conservation abilities were being tested!)
I’m still not quite used to seeing cows grazing by the side of the road. It’s pretty common out here.
We’re close to White Sands Missile Range. We heard some explosions earlier in the week, and we’ve been told to expect some sonic booms starting tomorrow.
On Saturday we drove out to White Sands National Monument. We started with some sledding!
After we were done sledding, we put the sleds in the car and ventured deeper into the park.
Another fascinating example of critters adapting to their environment:
Taking a snack and water break under some scarce shade:
Sand angels!
These White Sands dunes are made of gypsum (the same stuff that’s in drywall), so when a plant’s roots secret moisture, it hardens the surrounding gypsum. Over time, the dune blows away, but the hardened foundation and the plant remain:
I absolutely loved this place. It’s 275 square miles of stark beauty. If it weren’t for Jake and Melissa needing help with their move, we would have missed this. This has been one of my favorite places, 2nd only to Death Valley.
After a late lunch, we drove up to the White Sands Missile Range visitors center. Of greatest interest to me were all of the artifacts related to the Manhattan Project and the detonation of the world’s first nuclear bomb at the Trinity Site in 1945.
Outside, it was a sobering display of mankind’s inclination to destroy itself. There is something mesmerizing about these doomsday devices set against a serene backdrop of natural beauty.
We’ve been repeatedly warned about rattlesnakes since we got to New Mexico, but this little guy is the only snake we’ve encountered so far. (However, we did see a good size snake on the road yesterday that had just gotten run over by a car…I don’t know if it was a rattler, but it was big.)
The hummingbird moths are fun to watch.
I’m not really into flowers, but these are everywhere out here and I think they are incredibly cool: a fiery clump of red pedals held up high by a stalk that looks like a medieval weapon. The other day, I saw a bumble bee impaled on one of those vicious thorns. How cool is that?!?
The moon is out at night now and casting shadows.
I have to use a long exposure to get my camera to record what my eyes naturally see. It really is this beautiful out here at night. Maybe there is something to that “Land of Enchantment” thing.