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Approved For Release 2001/03/07
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Approved For Release 2001/03/07
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CPYRGHT
—
—
***sir!Cas3*tt~'C-s&CBm
New Mexico’s Great White Sands
113
Feathery Dunes
of Snow-white Gypsum
in
a
140,000-acre “Sandbox’
Make This Area Unique Among National Monuments
By William Belknap,
Jr.
With
Illustrations from Photographs
by
the Author
B
Y the time you reach White Sands Na-
tional
Monument,
near
Alamogordo,
New Mexico, you’re used
to mirages.
So
the
porcelain
streak you
see among
the
heat waves simply
can’t be
real.
You
still don’t believe
it when you start up
the eight-mile White Sands Drive.
You stop where
the road touches the
first
dune
and
run
your
hands
through
the
in-
credibly
soft
stuff,
cool and
delightful.
Off
come your shoes;
the
next impulse
is
to
lie
down and
roll.
It looks and
feels
like
fine sand, but there
the similarity ends.
For
these
hills
of stun-
ning white are wind-crumbled gypsum.*
Dunes Cast a Strange
Spell
Enchantment,
disbelief, puzzlement—-these
are
typical
reactions among
startled
visitors
to White Sands.
Many,
like my own family,
come with
little more than an inkling of the
scenic
surprises
in
store.
When we turned
off U.
S. Highway 70 at
the Monument
Visitor
Center,
the
country
looked
flat
and
unpromising.
I
began
to
wonder what
there would
be
to photograph.
Fran, my wife,
rolled down her window and
accepted our car permit from a ranger.
“Stay on
the
roads,
folks, and w^tch our
speed limits,” he said cheerfully. “Have fun!”
As we drove along White Sands Drive, my
disappointment
quickly
faded.
Shimmering
dunes, fresh as a wilderness snowfall, loomed
ahead.
Our son Buzz,
12, and daughter Loie,
10,
called
a
halt when we
reached
the
first
drifts
and
shot
from
the
car
as
if
spring-
ejected.
They scampered up a near-by slope,
dropped
to
their knees, and scooped up great
handfuls.
Then
the magic
hit Fran and me.
Match-
ing our children’s abandon, we slipped off our
shoes and raced up a snowy mound.
“I had no idea
it could be this beautiful,”
Fran said.
“It’s like fairvland!”
We strolled along the roadside dunes, fasci-
nated
by
the
way
desert
plants—yuccas,
sumacs, and even cottonwoods—managed
to
keep their heads above the sugary tide.
Here
and there we found grotesque mounds held to-
gether by close-knit root systems
(pages 126
and
127).
“Don’t look
back,”
I
said
to Fran
as we
headed
for
the
car.
“Remember
the
Bible
story
about
Lot’s
wife?
I’d
hate
to
leave
you here as a
pillar of gypsum!”
Like
three
million
visitors
before
us, we
began to appreciate White Sands’ uniqueness.
Later,
at
the museum, we
learned
it
is
the
world’s
largest
known
surface
deposit
of
gypsum
sand.
Utah
and
Australia
have
some, but neither deposit rivals New Mexico’s
275-square-mile
display.
Dunes
at
White
Sands are not only the
largest
in area;
they
move faster, pile steeper, look whiter, and are
just plain more
fun
than any
others.
Dizzy
statistics?
There
is
enough
white
^JtiescaJeroj
./Sjj'
" Reservatton^
-i
fll '
I
I >
* See “The White Sands
of Alamogordo,” by
Carl
P
Russell, National Geographic Magazine, August,
1935
Approved For Release 2001/03/07
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