A Bright Hard Day

After another windy night (we've just been told it is the windy season), the dawn came quietly. We had a westerly facing view from our campsite at Oliver Lee State park, outside of Alamogordo, with the mountains behind us. We could see the sunlight advancing across the desert towards the campground.

As the park was another dry open desert park and the road to White Sands, our first stop of the day, was dead straight and flat, we decided to move on rather than take the bikes out. We headed out with Speedy and the trailer to White Sands National Monument for the scenic drive, via van, not motorcycle. It was probably just as well since most of the drive was packed sand as opposed to pavement.

The first part of the drive was through low dunes studded with desert vegetation and we stopped for a short nature walk along a boardwalk which explained the plant and animal life in the dunes. Then we hit the sand road ... Suddenly the dunes became much taller and the plant life disappeared. The road seems to be kept open by constant road-grading and the hard packed route is dependent on the dune movement.

We stopped in a large parking area at the start of a hiking trail through the monument and walked up to the top of the closest high dune. It is a sea of blinding white sand. You could see areas that had been graded, but were now cut off from the road by the dunes. A group of kids were sliding down one of the dunes on plastic saucers and it looked like sledding in slow motion.

We were above Speedy with a steep slope down to the parking lot, so we semi-slid down to the van, filling our sandals with very fine gypsum sand.

We then finished our loop though the dune field and headed in the direction of Las Cruces; along the way we entered the White Sands Missile Range. There was a sign for a visitor center and museum, so we decided to take a look. It is an Army installation, so we had to park Speedy outside the gate, show identification and walk over to the museum.

Not only is White Sands the site of the first atomic bomb test, but the missile range was the original site of the the government's missile development and testing since WW II and continues to be the main site for military testing today. The museum is pretty small but has an interesting collection of artifacts of all types from the history of the range from archeological finds to 50s electronics gear to the contents of a cold war bomb shelter.

The real collection is outside. It is a large display of the Army and Navy missiles developed at the range. It is staggering how many small military missiles and rockets the military has built. They had everything from an original V-2 rocket, built from captured German parts after the war, to the Nike missiles that were stationed along the coasts through the 60s and 70s, to the medium range missiles that were capable of delivering tactical nuclear weapons from the Cold War to the Patriot Missiles used in Iraq.

One of the staggering comparisons in their display is a prototype of the 'Fat Man" atomic bomb, used on Nagasaki, which weighed 10 tons, and a missile from the 60s that was not much longer than six feet and was capable of delivering a nuclear weapon.

It was an interesting but sobering visit which to us highlighted the tremendous amount of science and engineering, not to mention money and lives, that has gone into destructive weapons.

This detour took a bit more time than expected and we didn't get to Las Cruces until nearly 3 pm and stopped by the side of the road for a late lunch. After abortive attempts to find a propane supplier in both Las Cruces and Hatch, we continued on to Caballo Lake State Park, south of Truth or Consequences (really), NM. While we did finally find propane near the park, the park itself resembled a parking lot overlooking a tiny lake formed by a dam on the Rio Grande. Grim to say the least.

Once again we moved on finally stopping at Elephant Butte Lake State Park, north of T or C, a much larger park on a much larger lake (also formed by a dam). The site we have here even has trees, showers and mobile broadband access. It was a long hard day of travel with a very bright, white start.

Photos