After leaving Roswell, I made my way toward White Sands National Park and chose the straightest direction even if it was over the mountain. And by taking that route, I came across the cute little community of Cloudcroft, New Mexico. Cloudcroft is a small mountain community that is at an elevation of over 8,000 feet. In the blazing hot summers of New Mexico, it is a paradise for folks trying to escape the heat. It is also high enough with enough snow to have a small ski slope. I drove up and
over the mountain and found my first western mammals in the tops of the hills. It was only a mule deer but it was great to finally see something. It was 70 degrees in Las Cruces , but there was snow on the mountain in Cloudcroft.
My next stop was in Alamogordo. It is the closest town to White Sands National Park, and I would get there before returning home, but in the meantime, Alamogordo had something that I wanted to see – the world’s largest pistachio! Fine, it’s silly, but when I was doing the tourism economic dominance index, I talked about hooks (what gets people to stop in your community that costs little but gets them to stop and spend money). This was definitely a hook I had to see. In the end, there wasn’t much to the town. It was a relatively in the middle of nowhere sort of community, but it was surrounded in all directions by groves of pistachio trees. And where this large pistachio sculpture stood was a store called PistachioLand. What was inside was a wide variety of pistachios, pistachio related products and souvenirs containing the images of pistachios. They were clearly capitalizing on their pistachio centrality. I looked around for a while bought the traditional postcards, shot glasses as well as a wide variety of pistachios to share with friends and family… And maybe to eat a few myself.
And then as I headed back towards my little home in Las Cruces, I headed for White Sands National Park. The ground around me as I was entering the park was as gray as the land had been for the last number of miles mostly Rock, trees, some prairie grass occasionally and the typical sand of the desert brown with a mix of cactus thorns and Dead Leaves and other uncomfortable to step on stuff. Just about when I turned in to the White Sands National Park, I quickly started to see a high propensity of white stone and where you didn’t see white stone you saw white sand. Suddenly it was like you had found a mountain of beach sand all around you. Hills of sand 20-30 ft tall with Dune grasses growing out of them and it wasn’t just one mountain or Hill of sand it was Miles and Miles of hills of sand.
White Sands National park had become a national park in 2019 but was a National Monument back in 1933. The goal was to preserve the unique geological feature that created this sand. The sand was not seashells and coral but gypsum which was also left behind by the large inland sea that used to divide the North American continent.
Besides looking at the dunes of sand that were around you, there wasn’t much else to do but I’m really glad that I got to stop along the way and see this amazing geological wonder in the middle of New Mexico. It is hard to remember sometimes that the great inland ocean left a variety of impacts on the interior of our country.
This Journey had been productive: three national parks and two bucket list places are now checked off and I learned how to drive my new truck before I had to tow with it. Home is where the RV is parked so now it was time to head home in Las Cruces. Real soon Home would be Arizona.