National Parks and Recreation

Our Christmas vacation began in New Mexico. Well, technically it began by flying to Phoenix and then renting a car and driving the six hours to Albuquerque. Bless James for allowing me to drag him on these ridiculously long travel days on Christmas. It just works out so well for us to travel on Christmas Day because James gets Christmas – New Year’s off every year anyway with his job, and my job slows to an almost halt around that time. We decided to extend this particular vacation into two weeks, partly because these national parks deserved some extra time, but mostly because BU had a couple of hockey games the second weekend in January so it gave us the perfect excuse!

So, much like we did almost exactly five years prior, we returned to the Southwestern desert under the guise of BU hockey fandom to explore the desert’s beautiful national parks.

As I said, we began our trip in Albuquerque with one of my best friends from college. This ended up working out even better than I expected because, if you’ve read my national park posts before, you might remember that high altitude and I do not get along at all. And if you don’t know, Albuquerque is over a mile up (even higher than Denver). So having a few days there to get acclimated was perfect. Though at the time I didn’t see it as the blessing it was, spending most of the time there feeling absolutely terrible and sleeping only an hour or so each night. But in hindsight it was great to get it over with early in the trip so that by the time we got to the national parks and were ready to do some hiking and whatnot, I felt completely fine!

While in New Mexico, our friends were nice enough to bring us down to White Sands for a day trip to mark off National Park #1 of the trip and #14 of our National Park Mission! It was a beautiful three and a half hour drive through the desert to get there from Albuquerque.

It was so crazy how the sands just seemed to appear on the horizon out of nowhere. Nature is so cool!

So White Sands National Park is one of the four new parks that have been officially designated as National Parks since James and I first set out on this mission. There were only 59 when we started, but there are now 63 with the addition of the Gateway Arch (don’t get me started on how dumb it is that that is an official NP), Indiana Sand Dunes, White Sands, and New River Gorge (which you might remember I visited back in 2020, just two weeks before it was officially announced as a National Park). Meaning White Sands is the second newest park in the National Park System.

Science lesson! So the White Sands are actually gypsum crystals that were eroded down into sand. Four billion metric TONS of sand! The gypsum lived up in those mountains you see in the distance until the planet started warming after the Ice Age and it all melted down into the Tularosa Basin before getting blown and eroded by the wind even further away from the mountains. Today, the sand dunes span 275 square miles and are roughly 30-60 feet deep depending on the dunes. I couldn’t even wrap my head around how far beneath our feet the sand kept going.

Another fascinating part of the park is its shared land with the White Sands Missile Range, the largest military installation in the United States. It’s 3,200 square miles big and shares a long border with the national park. You should definitely look this up on Google Maps because I find it hilarious how Google Maps just blanks out the entire area. There’s just a sharp line through the northern part of the national park where the missile range technically starts and it’s all just blurred out. We had to drive basically around the entire thing to get there and a lot of jokes were made about what was actually going on in there. But fun fact: that’s where the first atomic bomb was test detonated. The Columbia Space Shuttle also landed there during one of its earliest missions. Pretty cool!

But back to the park!

You can and should do this park in a day. There isn’t really any lodging options super nearby and you can definitely see everything you need to see in an afternoon. Honestly, the best thing to do is just drive the Scenic Drive, pull over at a parking area, and take off into the dunes.

We opted to do the Alkali Flat Trail, the most popular trail in the park. The parking area for this one is huge so I can’t imagine you’d have too much of an issue finding a spot. And once you’re on the actual trail, it’s really more of just a guide. These metal posts are placed every 50-100 feet, guiding the way, but you’re free to just go off and explore the dunes at your leisure.

Hiking through the sand is no joke! I’ve heard it’s easier in the colder months, because the sand quasi freezes and makes it a little stiffer, but it was still not easy by any means. Make sure you bring lots of water and rest when you need to!

And keep an eye on your four-legged friends, if you’re lucky enough to have one to bring along, because Dorado here was going crazy sprinting through the sand and we had to make sure he kept drinking water and didn’t completely exhaust himself.

But it’s pretty hard to deny that face anything he wants to do.

We probably did about half of the actual trail loop before cutting through the middle and heading back. You’d think the views would get redundant after a certain amount of time, but I honestly just kept saying “wow” to myself (and out loud) pretty much the entire time we were there. It truly never got old.

And every way you turned, the sun would reflect differently off the sand and give you a whole new perspective.

Like this absolutely insane glitter sand!

There’s a lot more you can do with more time in the park if you want to explore even more, we were just perfectly content wandering around the dunes and taking a thousand pictures.

Probably the most fun thing that we didn’t really check out was sledding in the park! You can buy sleds for like $20 in the visitor center (or pick one up at a WalMart on your way in) and sled to your heart’s content on the dunes. I’m not going to lie, it looked like a LOT of fun. But not worth spending $20 on. We saw two left at the trailhead that I assume were just people who were done using theirs paying it forward, but I didn’t want to take them just in case someone was coming back for them. If you go with kids though, I HIGHLY recommend bringing a sled, it looked like a blast!

And that was our day in White Sands National Park! A HUGE thank you to Delaney, Trevor and Dorado for showing us around beautiful New Mexico! It’s not your fault your high altitude was trying to kill me the entire time I was there.

But at least it was beautiful while I was dying.

But sadly, it was soon time to leave and head on to our Utah Mighty Five adventure. Albuquerque, we’ll be back. To see my friends and explore more of the area, of course. But also because it broke my heart to see this picture of Dorado waiting for me as I loaded up the car with all our luggage.

Until next time!