White, fine sand - as far as the eye can see ...

After our short detour to El Paso and the associated short visit to the state of Texas (some say we only went there to scratch off this state on our world map at home - naughty, naughty...) our Cactus Mobile safely brought us to the whitest dunes ever.

The White Sands National Park is located near the city of Alamogordo in New Mexico. In this park there is a 710 square kilometer field of white sand dunes made of gypsum crystals. This white dune area is the largest of its kind on earth. Here are dunes up to 18 meters high. The entire field is said to consist of 4.1 billion tons of gypsum sand (who has ever weighed that?).

But where does all the white, fine-grained sand come from? About 12,000 years ago, there were large lakes, streams, grasslands, and ice-age mammals in the Tularosa Basin. As the climate warmed, rain and snowmelt dissolved gypsum from the surrounding mountains and carried it into the basin. The lakes evaporated due to further warming and drying, and selenite crystals formed. Strong winds then broke the crystals and transported them eastward. A similar process still produces gypsum sand today.

Enough of the clever information from the web.

At first, the entrance to the dune area seemed rather unspectacular to us. Anyone who has been to Sylt or Gran Canaria and has already seen the wandering dunes there or elsewhere would not have expected anything exciting here. But, as we have often noticed after visiting a national park, the entrance is only good for the first "Wow". It often gets even better in the middle of the park. It was the same here. The further we came into the area, the longer our mouths stayed open. A landscape like a ski resort. If we hadn't had over 35 degrees, you could have thought we were on an alpine high road that had just been cleared of snow. That's exactly what it looked like at the roadside and in the parking lots.

A walk through the dune landscape revealed fantastic pictures. In combination with the blue sky, the white clouds, and the white sand, we were constantly considering which one looked better? This motif or this perspective...??? There was actually no decision for the most beautiful picture.

But what was also - once again - astonishing was that these dunes only exist here and nowhere else. Even in the large area where the National Park is located, there is "only" this area with sand. Everything around it is as usual: barren steppe with a mountain backdrop.

What also caught our attention is that there are many parking lots along the Scenic Drive that are the size of soccer fields. In addition to the picnic huts that look like ski lift gondolas, there is still a grill that can be used. On one grill there were even two ready-grilled sausages, but we decided to leave them there... :)

Once again, we were completely thrilled by what the USA has to offer in terms of beautiful landscapes and special features. A country of inexhaustible "natural wonders".