Visit to White Sands National Monument

Our next stop was to White Sands National Monument (perhaps our favorite stop of the four places we went to). White Sands is a very large dune field of gypsum dunes (the largest of its kind in the world). The sand is pure white and very fine so it's quite soft and cool (because it's white). People bring sleds to slide down the dunes and so we did too. Here we are at the visitor's center sign. There were lots of people there that day. We arrived around 5:30 pm, perfect timing to avoid the heat of the afternoon and watch the sunset out on the dunes.

So one interesting site that we hadn't seen before was these strange looking plants that are called Yucca plants. If you recall, we used to live on Yucca St. and the Yucca plant is the state plant of NM. We learned that their roots can go down as far as 30 feet into the dunes!

Here's Travis on top of one of the dunes. The top surface of the dunes are quite hard and then one slope is very steep and soft and perfect for sledding.

Here's Marcus sporting his backwards hat look (he likes to turn it around backwards for some reason). He enjoyed himself but always wanted to sled with Dad.

Lucas had lots of fun too. They played quite hard in this sand.

Here's a cool photo of Angela and Marcus. It was neat to just see white sand and sky and not much else. Probably would be blinding in the mid day sun.

Brian and Angela enjoyed it there as you can see below.

Here was a nice family photo we took of us on the dunes. Doesn't it just look like we should have our coats on in all this "snow"?

Here's a video of the kinds of views you see out in the dunes. Also a video of Lucas and Travis sledding down. We highly recommend going here if you've ever in this area, but it is a long drive to get there.