RV Winter Rambling 2006-07

All Day We Roamed the Barren Waste……….


Highway 80 out of Douglas, Arizona up to I10 in New Mexico should be the ‘loneliest highway in America. I do believe that this title has been taken by a highway in northern Nevada but we travelled 90 miles along Hwy 80 – an hour and a half trip – and we didn’t have one vehicle behind or in front of us. We only met about a half a dozen vehicles coming the other way. The scenery was kind of nice though…mountains and grasslands, not many cacti other than a whole lot of yuccas. But when we crossed the border to New Mexico and reached Interstate 10, the vista was bleak. Arid flat grasslands for mile after mile – signs warned that we could run into dustbowl conditions and experience zero visibility. Thank goodness it was a hot sunny day with nary a breeze in the air.

We stopped for the night in Las Cruces in a Walmart. We hadn’t done that for a long time and it was kind of nice to stay in a centre of commerce again. As we drove into the Walmart lot, we were met by a security truck with a flashing light on top…”Uh, oh!” But he was there to welcome us “Are you folks planning on staying the night?” he inquired pleasantly. When we assented, he said, “Follow me” and piloted us to the east end of the lot into a specially allocated but unmarked RV section, cut off from the main lot. “Enjoy your evening and we’ll be making sure that everything is safe.”


White Sands National Park is situated about forty miles north east of Las Cruces. It was a beautiful warm and sunny day as we travelled through the San Augustin Pass through the craggy Mountains that form a backdrop to the city of Las Cruces. The extensive view below of the eastern valley and the White Sands Missile Range was extraordinary – flat lands that seemed to stretch to perpetuity. There had obviously once been an inland sea there.

With a speed limit of 75mph, it was no time before we reached the entrance to the park. We could see the beginnings of the dunes from the highway but we weren’t prepared for the sights ahead. The road into the park, normally eight miles long was closed at the six and a half mile point because of the rains last year, which didn’t stop until October. There is no river to drain the waters that pool into an expansive lake. The water has to be absorbed into the sands so it takes time after a wet season for things to return to normal.

We felt as if we’d arrived at the North Pole with sand so white and pristine that it could easily be taken for snow. They use graders on the road because the sand dunes keep moving with the winds and cover it; this creates banks at each side of the road. The result is that it appeared as if we were travelling through a winter highway just after a snowstorm. The incongruous thing was that on the more established dunes, yuccas (which look a bit like palm trees) grew right up threw the sand. We ran up the dunes like children although somewhat clumsily as our feet sunk into the lush powder. Families brought out what looked like plastic garbage can covers and tobogganed down the slopes, though sand inhibits movement unlike snow, which is slick and fast. We took a mile long hike into the dunes on a trail marked with the flora and fauna of the area. Large cottonwood trees would grow through dunes as high as sixty feet, displaying just the top of the branches. The yuccas stretched as high as the dunes, their roots still buried in the soil at the very base of the dune. Insect and reptile tracks could be seen in the sand for a short time until the sands shifted with the winds.

posted by O'Leary @ 8:25 PM