After our little ghost town escapade, we headed to our camp site for the night: White Sands National Monument.
It was so peaceful, so still, so stunning.
And so sandy.
I may have done a bit of grumbling about having to walk through it after two years over trudging through sand almost daily.
But it was still undeniably gorgeous.
Seriously...isn't this just amazing?!
We parked, ate dinner, then hiked over the sand dunes with our gear.
So how does one pitch a tent on sand dunes? Actually, one doesn't. One pitches one's tent in the flat areas (valleys, you could say) between the sand dunes.
A new sport: sand sledding.
It almost looks like another world. What makes the sand so white, you ask? It's made from gypsum rock - beat to a soft powder by the elements - instead of the quartz rocks that most sand comes from. Apparently gypsum doesn't absorb the sun's heat, so you can walk on it with bare feet even when it's really hot.
Those four-wheeler tire tracks furnished us with fuel for some pretty thrilling stories that night...
Like a pair of giant snakes - newlyweds on their honeymoon, slithering around the camp and eating campers.
I may have a slightly outlandish imagination.
All that sand absorbed so much sound, it was almost eerily quiet - which also furnished fuel for our evening story time.
Rainbow!
This storm sprinkled us a bit the next morning as we were taking down our tent.
Do you see the bug tracks? (Yes, they were really made by that black beetle in the other picture. I promise it's not my outlandish imagination.)
After a little peek around the visitor center, we were on the road again.
Twister sighting!
We camped in Texas that night, and I flew to Denver the next day for more adventures.
Adventures. They seemed to be my one weakness...at least at the time.
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