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1997-98
The Shifting Sands
By Frank Zoretich
For The Journal
Editor's note: The following story was written as part of a series called "Cheap Thrills" for the Albuquerque Journal. The criteria for these "thrills" are 1) a day-trippable circle roughly 150 miles from Albuquerque and 2) fees of no more than $10. Enjoy.
WHITE SANDS NATIONAL MONUMENT—After duty in the deserts of Arabia, many thousands of Americans will never want to see another grain of sand.
For them, visiting a place like this would be a pilgrimage into memory. No matter how the sands of time obscure dreadful events, the past will ever be swept bare for them here, a past jutting stark as bone in this landscape of heartless beauty.
The sand here, composed of gypsum particles blown northeastward by wind from the dry bed of Lake Lucero, is different from the browner sands, mostly composed of particles of quartz, that drift across the deserts of Saudi Arabia and Iraq.
And there are dune formations over there that aren't found here —particularly, large star-shaped dunes and seifs, or parallel sand ridges, that extend for miles.
White Sands National MonumentLocation: In Alamogordo, about 10 miles from White Sands Missile Range.
Hours: 7 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. daily
Cost: $3 a vehicle ($1 a person if you're on a bus or hiking or biking) to see the dunes. For more information, call 437-1058.
Features: 230 square miles of white gypsum sand dunes.
But sand is sand, no matter what it's made of.
A definition of sand: chunks of mineral smaller than 1/25 of an inch in diameter but bigger than 1/400 of an inch. Anything smaller is dust. Anything larger, stones. Neither dust nor stones are molded by wind into the graceful aerodynamic shapes of dunes.
The 230 square miles of White Sands National Monument contain only a portion of the gypsum dunes that march more than 10 miles beyond the monument's border into the adjoining White Sands Missile Range. (Occasionally, missile tests force closure of the monument as well as the highway that passes its entrance.)
The last time I passed through Alamogordo, located on the east side of the Tularosa Basin, about 15 miles east of the dunes, it was a hot day at the end of August. The white sands shimmered in the sun along the base of the San Andres Mountains. It was peak tourist season, and the dunes would be filled with people. But I couldn't convince myself to join them. It was just too hot. Winter, I thought, would be the perfect time to return.
In mid-January, just before the U.N. deadline authorizing force to remove Iraq from Kuwait, I found shirt-sleeve weather and only a handful of people at White Sands.
There's no charge for dropping in at the visitor's center and museum, open daily from 7 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. But to drive into the dunes, you have to pay an entrance fee of $3 a vehicle ($1 a person if you're on a bus or hiking or biking). The loop road is open from 7 a.m. until 30 minutes past sunset. For more information, contact Superintendent, White Sands National Monument, Box 458, Alamogordo, N.M. 88310, or call 437-1058.
From the entrance gate, you follow a 16-mile loop road that takes you to a section of the monument known as "Heart of Sands."
You know you've arrived at Heart of Sands when the road changes from pavement to hard-packed white gypsum.
Sand dunes tower 30 feet high and more in every direction. As you drive between them, the heaps of white look almost like giant drifts of snow and the white gypsum road looks slick as ice.
Alternatively, the landscape seems almost industrial -- as if you're viewing the tailings of some immensely large talc mine.
Parking areas big enough to contain large crowds of tourist cars have been plowed level in gaps between the dunes.
By midafternoon of a windless day, many of the dune slopes facing the road have been marked with footprints -- and with giant letters, purely temporary graffiti spelling out the names of recent visitors.
When you park and get out of your car, the first thing you'll do is climb the nearest dune. That's what everybody does. And when you reach the top of your dune and look across at all the others close to the road, you'll see that many of them have at least one person at or near the top.
An occasional determined hiker heads out across the wind-shaped waves of this sea of sand, but most people stay quite close to their cars.
Here and there you'll find someone riding a plastic saucer down a steep dune-slope -- they call it sand-surfing.
I wandered adrift through the dunes, up and down from crest to trough, until I lost my sense of where the road was. I tried to imagine what it would be like to live -- and fight a battle -- in all this sand. I felt completely, absolutely alone and exposed beneath the sky. There was no place to hide.
