Boogie Boards in White Sands National Park

Somewhere on the drive in, the highway turned white. The asphalt faded into compacted gypsum and the world outside changed color. Israel (one of my best friends from my undergrad time at UCLA) and I pulled over almost immediately, not because we planned to, but because what was happening outside the windshield seemed to require confirmation.

We got out. Twenty-nine degrees, sharp winter sun, and underfoot something that looked like fresh powder but packed like cold dry sand. Within ten minutes I'd unzipped my jacket. The gypsum was returning radiant heat from every surface, bouncing the December sun back upward with the efficiency of fresh snow, and the result was this pleasant sensory contradiction: visible breath, warm face.

Israel had his dark lenses on. He's a suave Chilean-American with facial hair that honestly is pretty reminiscent of what Jesus may have looked like (PS - if the lyrics from When We Were Young by The Killers is now playing through your head, I don't blame you. Same thing happened to me after I wrote that sentence). Anyways, the dunes were already bright enough that I was squinting through my own pair, but he was looking out at the basin with the expression of someone watching ordinary desert. Then he lifted his sunglasses, and the white hit him all at once.

He laughed. "Now I see why they call it White Sands." Up until this point, the dunes had apparently just looked like regular yellow dunes. 

We had boogie boards from the Springhill Suites in Las Cruces, which is the correct way to arrive at a national park. No pretension. Just two friends with plastic sleds standing at the base of a gypsum dune going straight up into a sky so blue it looked painted on.

The sledding was fast and clean. Cool gypsum on the climb, then the drop, then the flat run-out at the bottom. Then looking back up the slope and noticing that our footprints from the previous run were already half-gone. The breeze had moved the surface in the time it took us to walk down and turn around. By the third or fourth run, the path we'd made on the first was smoothed almost flat.

We'd pause after each descent and scan the horizon for my black Honda Fit. Often it had disappeared, swallowed by a ridge we hadn't noticed building between us and the parking lot. I'd look around for something to anchor to. In every direction the dunes were identical: the same white curve, none distinguishable from the next. No trees, no rocks, no formations. The light was too uniform and the shadows too faint for the usual tricks.

I've hiked in a lot in the 63 National Parks. The disorientation I felt on those dunes was unlike anything I'd experienced elsewhere, and it was entirely out of proportion to the actual risk. The car was maybe a quarter mile away. But when every direction looks the same and your own footprints are disappearing behind you in real time, the quarter mile stops feeling like a quarter mile.

The dunes aren't silica sand. They're gypsum, calcium sulfate left behind by an ancient sea that dried up over thousands of years and deposited its minerals across the basin. Gypsum is water-soluble, so rain doesn't just erode these dunes, it dissolves them. Wind moves them continuously. They migrate toward the northeast at rates up to thirty feet per year. What you're walking on isn't quite a landscape in the usual sense, more like a process that looks, from the outside, like a landscape. The footprints go because the surface is always in motion, filling in what you leave behind with the same indifference it brings to everything else.

What this means practically depends entirely on which part of the park you're in, and White Sands gives you a genuine spectrum to choose from. The Interdune Boardwalk is a raised structure through the dunes that keeps you oriented by keeping you on a fixed path, though sometimes this path can still get covered by drift sand. The Playa Trail extends about a mile and a half into the basin, marked with posts spaced close enough that keeping the route is pretty easy. Both are reasonable options if you're arriving without much time or want to feel the place without committing to it.

The Alkali Flat Trail is not as easy. Five miles round trip into the deepest section of the dunes, with minimal marking and the park service explicitly flagging disorientation as a real risk. We did a modified version of this, wandering off trail with the boogie boards rather than sticking to any designated route. Before we went anywhere I dropped a GPS pin at the car and grabbed a physical map from the visitor center. Both felt like overkill standing in the parking lot. The first time I looked back and the Honda had vanished, I was glad I had both.

Timing can help too. In the morning, the low sun angle casts the dunes in cream and gold, and the shadows between ridges give you enough topographic information to read the terrain. By midday the sun is overhead, the shadows flatten, and the whole basin goes a uniform white with almost no depth information in the surface at all. Late afternoon swings back toward amber and the shadows return. We were there in the morning, which meant we had the shadows working for us. A summer midday visit to Alkali Flat, when the surface is giving you almost nothing to read and the temperature is genuinely dangerous, is a different experience from what I'm describing.

The UV situation is the thing most people don't anticipate, especially in winter. The same reflective efficiency that made my face warm at 29°F bounces UV radiation upward from every surface around you, irradiating you from below as effectively as the sun from above. Polarized lenses aren't optional here, and not just for comfort. The glare off gypsum is intense enough that navigating without them means squinting hard enough to miss the shifts in the sand (read: elevation changes or tripping hazards). And sunscreen applies regardless of what the thermometer says. 

One last unrelated fun fact. White Sands sits inside White Sands Missile Range, an active military testing facility. The park closes periodically when the range is in use. You check the park website before you drive out, or you don't, and you find out at the gate. Of the 63 national parks, it is the only one that might be temporarily unavailable because the government is firing rockets nearby.

We made it in without incident. We sledded until our arms gave out from hauling the boards back uphill. By the time we loaded up and pointed back toward Las Cruces, the temperature had climbed enough that the jacket came off entirely. I looked up the missile range closure policy that evening for the first time. The testing happens on an irregular schedule. Sometimes they'll close it twice in a week. Sometimes not for a month. There's no pattern you can plan around. You just have to check.