After we broke camp in Big Bend, we drove 7 or so hours northwest to White Sands National Park, just outside Alamogordo, NM. The visibility was SO bad on the whole drive and so it wasn't a total surprise when we arrived at the park to 60 mph winds...note that in that second picture that Abigail is NOT holding her sled in place. That's just wind.
I'd read online that our hotel had plastic sleds that you could borrow for sand sledding, so we stopped in Alamogordo to check in before heading over to the park. I was SO glad we did this when we got to the park and saw that they were selling sleds for $25 each! (They'll buy them back from you for $5 in store credit, yikes. Not a great deal.)
You can camp in White Sands, but it's backcountry only and has not reopened post-Covid. And after getting sandblasted for a few hours, I was so very exquisitely happy to go back to our hotel and shower rather than trying to hose myself off before crawling into a sleeping bag.
Our plan had been to get to the park around 4 and then stay for the next 4 hours until it closed at 8 PM so that we could watch the sunset. I packed tons of games and had visions of us sledding down the hills for hours, walking over the dunes on the Alkali Flats trail, and eating our delicious Dutch oven cobblers and some cast-iron skillet pizza.
But when we pulled up at the picnic area the wind was so intense that we couldn't even stand up straight, let alone think about lighting briquettes! (We ended up ordering Papa John's and eating it in our hotel room, which was actually pretty great.)
We all sledded down the dunes for awhile, which was pretty fun. The kids got really good at "shield-surfing," aka imitating Legolas sliding down off of Helm's Deep through the orcs.
Neil and I started walking a little bit of the Alkali Flats trail while the kids were sledding by the trailhead, but honestly I cannot imagine hiking 5 miles up and down dunes! I'm not surprised that so many people have died on that particular trail.
We lasted about two hours until the wind had picked up to the point that it was just pretty miserable. The sand is super super fine (it's gypsum and much finer than normal silica sand), but even so, it really started to hurt after awhile.
So gorgeous though!
We learned from the park video that the younger dunes will move up to 38 feet a year! And we definitely saw that in action.
Even though it was far from what I'd envisioned for our time at White Sands, it was still pretty awesome.
Probably not a park I will be in a hurry to return to, but absolutely worth a stop if you're in the area! (One thing I found kind of amusing was that all the park signage/videos/etc. still say "National Monument" despite the park becoming a National Park in 2019. I felt like they were super chill about it and not in a rush to change everything over, which was funny for some reason.
After we left the park, we went back to the hotel, got everyone settled and started on showers, ate our pizza, and then Neil and I headed over to the Walmart just down the street to grab stuff like milk, ice, band-aids, apples, salads, a party-size bag of Yorks...you know, the essentials. Probably the worst part of the entire trip for me was then unpacking the back of the car, draining the water out of the Yeti (which necessitates removing it from the car), repacking it with ice and all the new groceries, and then packing everything back in on top of it. It was soooooo cold and windy and all I wanted was a blazing hot shower to wash away all the sand (I had so much sand in my hair, I had to shampoo it three times) and a comfy bed that was NOT in a tent!
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