Last week I visited what is now White Sands National Park as of 2019, a wonderous and, quite frankly, seemingly otherworldly gift from white gypsum located in the Tularosa Basin of New Mexico, where I have also now resided four months and counting.
I’d been to the park when it was still a national monument roughly twenty years ago for the hot air balloon races that occur there in September. Last week, there were no balloon races, but I had my very own personal tour guides in the form of an Alamogordo couple, Eileen and Johnny, who once volunteered at White Sands during the sixteen years they lived and toured the US as fulltime RVers.
I first met them this summer when Eileen and I discovered that we (inexplicably) graduated from the same high school in Arlington, Virginia known as W-L, albeit she was nineteen years ahead of me. Furthermore, Eileen has also written a novel series, three travel mysteries based in part on their RV adventures.
Eileen writes her Madge Franklin Mystery series under the pseudonym Kate McLaughlin, the first of which I read last month, Fast Food Kills, published in 2015. Therein, I was delighted to find myself immersed in a tale initially taking place in Alamogordo, including White Sands National Monument, as it was designated at the time.
From Fast Food Kills, I learned fascinating white gypsum geological tidbits, including a shallow water table beneath the dunes of White Sands keeps the sand moist just blow the surface. Evaporation of this moisture has a natural cooling effect on the sand. Consequently, gypsum sand does not absorb heat from the sun like typical beach or desert silica-based sand. Its reflective properties and moisture content keep it cool to the touch of hands and feet, even on the hottest of New Mexico summer days. Its high reflectivity is also why the sand appears brilliantly white because its grains reflect, rather than absorb, much of the sun’s energy.
But the White Sands fact that most resonated from Eileen’s first novel was why this park exists. It turns out, some tourists are under the absurdly mistaken impression that the exotic and pristine white sand dunes were caused by the 1945 detonation of the first atomic bomb at what was to become known as the Trinity Site in the Tularosa Basin, one hundred miles north of the park.
Actually, as a park ranger explains in Fast Food Kills, if it weren’t for the creation of the surrounding White Sands Missile Range in 1958, which necessitated buying up of ranches and homesteads within the basin, the dunes would be long gone by now. Much like similar gypsum dunes in Mexico were eventually eroded by agricultural activity.
How floored was I, former environmental lawyer for the military, to learn that a bombing range had actually served to protect an adjacent area from economic exploitation and development? Because, without that additional military buffering after President Hoover proclaimed it a national monument in 1933, White Sands National Park would not cover 275 square miles of the Chihuahuan Desert, making it the largest gypsum dune field in the world. By comparison, the next largest gypsum dune field in Mexico is only about six square miles.
The gypsum dunes themselves actually formed some 10,000 years ago, with the missile range and Holliman Air Force Base growing up around the dune field, of which the park protects 40 percent. The remaining 60 percent is still protected by the federal government because civilian tourists cannot access the missile range or the military base.
By the way, the difference between a national monument and a national park is merely in how they are created. US presidents designate national monuments, whereas national parks are created by Congress. But both are protected and operated by the National Park Service.
Other fun facts learned from Eileen:
- A geological drainage basin is an area of land where all precipitation and runoff converges into a single point, known as an outlet, but a closed basin like Tularosa is a land area with no outlet.
- An ancient lake once existing in the Tularosa Basin is called Lake Otero, which explains why we live in Otero County.
- Tularosa and La Luz, the latter being the town where I now reside, were the first villages within the Tularosa Basin.
- Selenite is a crystalline form of gypsum. Ancient Greeks used selenite in their temple windowpanes. The lining shining through onto their alters looked like moonlight, hence they named the substance selenite after their moon goddess Selene.
- Gypsum has been used in construction for thousands of years due to fire-retardant capabilities. When a gypsum wall catches fire, the water within gypsum turns to steam, which quenches the fire. The remaining calcium sulfate is non-flammable.
- Gypsum forms the base for many brands of toothpaste.
How much of this about White Sands National Park will end up in my next Other Worldly novel in progress, Alien Origins, is yet to be determined, though I’m pretty sure I’ll be mentioning the moon goddess Selene when it comes to selenite. And you can bet it’ll be more than my inadvertently inaccurate reference to having obtained my “Three Rivers Petroglyphs mug from visiting White Sands,” in book two, Feeling Alienated. Because the Three Rivers Petroglyph Site isn’t in the national park, but it is a historical landmark within the Tularosa Basin.
In my defense, I hadn’t been there in a couple of decades, and I also had no clue when I wrote Feeling Alienated back in 2020 that I’d be living here in five years, mere miles from the magnificent petroglyphs depicted on the mug I still have. Positively uncanny. Along with having created a character from Alamogordo, former CIA officer Oswald Winslow aka Win, and Red Orbiter Roger Rogers from nearby El Paso, Texas.
Three Rivers is definitely my next adventure for a much-anticipated revisit. Maybe I can talk my new pals Eileen and Johnny into going with me. At least I could return the favor and share everything I’ve learned about petroglyphs over the years. But who am I kidding? I’m nowhere near their league when it comes to tour guiding, yet I am nonetheless grateful to have such wonderful, adventurous and knowledgeable friends so soon after moving to the land of geological enchantment.
One more thing I’ve realized after visiting White Sands National Park is that, once my Other Worldly protagonist Rowan Layne travels to other planets, moons, and stars beginning in book three, Aliens Abound, she often describes these alien locales in comparison to places on Earth. Now, it looks as if Rowan might instead compare spots on Earth to otherworldly ecosystems visited in outer space. The question is, what planet or distant star will White Sands resemble?
Crazy connections!