Dates we visited: March 26th - March 30th 2021
Where we stayed: Las Cruces KOA

About 45 minutes northeast of Las Cruces, New Mexico is one of the newest National Parks, White Sands. It was upgraded from a National Monument to a National Park in 2019. The park sits inside of the White Sands Missile Range military installation, which makes for some interesting travel planning. Most notably the only access road into the park is occasionally closed due to missile tests. Luckily, these are usually scheduled a few weeks in advance, and it was not a problem for us to plan around them using the schedule on the park website.

Dunes

As you might imagine, this park is named for what it is, a place filled with white sand. Sand dunes are already relatively rare and dunes like these, with sand made from gypsum, are even more unusual. The dunes vary in height around the park, but the tallest are around 60 feet, making them quite accessible to climbing. Most of the sand is very soft, so much so that we all decided to go barefoot within a few minutes of arriving. Owen will attest to the fact that hiking these dunes barefoot is no problem, and rather fun!

Exploration

The park itself is quite large, as there are 275 square miles of dunes, totalling over 4.5 billion tons of gypsum sand according to the park service. However, there is only one road in the park. The loop road starts at the visitor center and is just a couple of miles long. It is paved for the first half and unpaved, hard-packed sand for the second half. It is easily traversable in most any vehicle and there are plenty of pull-offs and parking areas. One of the best things about this park is that open exploration, and even sledding, is allowed in the dunefield. You just have to stay clear of any vegetation.

Owen, as well as Kristy and I, absolutley loved hiking out to a random dune and frollicking in the sand. Owen spent most of the afternoon pretending that the sand was snow, which at first glance, it definitely resembles. Making “snow” angels and burying Kristy in the were some of the highlights. It’s good to see that the kid hasn’t forgotten his Minnesota roots!

While all of Kristy’s photos are spectacular, she really got some great shots at this park. Don’t forget to head over to the photo album to check them out! We really enjoyed this park, and if you have children this one is an especially good destination. Just be prepared to clean sand out of, well, everywhere and everything for the next week. It’s totally worth it though :)