White Sands

A few weekends ago we decided to try out camping in our new car and head down to White Sands, NM–despite the fact that a giant snow storm was expected to cover New Mexico that weekend. The weather forecast is usually 50-50, right?

White Sands National Monument is an incredible natural wonder in our new state. It's filled with snow white sand dunes for miles and miles, and while you'd expect there to be a lake nearby, there's no water. People come with sleds, giant umbrellas, grills and picnic food and basically have your typical day at the beach without the swimming/water part. We came ill-prepared in that sense, but still had a great time trodding around the dunes. I can imagine that it would be really easy to get lost there.

We left White Sands when the giant billowing storm clouds finally made their way across the dunes. We headed northeast of Alamogordo to the Lincoln National Forest and after much searching found a nice place to park/camp on the side of the mountains. The view was once again incredible. I feel like our car should be in a Toyota commercial here.

That is actually White Sands off in the distance. Looked like a lake from our camp site.

The sun peaked out just long enough for an excellent sunset.

Car camping! Auggie did great.

When we arrived at our campsite the temperature was just short of 70˚F. In the middle of the night Dan woke up because he was too cold. He turned on the car to discover that (a) it was 23˚F outside, and (b) it was only 4:30am. Since we were all up at that point we decided to leave. We headed north and soon the road was covered in a sheet of ice... Ugh. ... We ended up having quite the adventure home, because about an hour or two after we left we found a family in their pick-up truck in the ditch. They had done a 180˚ on the ice and two of their tires had nearly come completely off their rims. We piled them up in our car, extra car seat and all, and took them to the nearest town and waited with them for a couple of hours until they had everything worked out with a tow-truck. I think it was the grace of God that we stopped to get them, because there was seriously an inch of ice on the road and who even knows what could have happened to us had we continued to drive. And like all crazy snow and ice in New Mexico, it was all melted by 10am.

On our way home we checked out a bouldering spot called The Box (climbers name things the weirdest things) in Socorro, NM. It had potential, although at 32˚F we were not interested in sticking around for long. Here's Auggie, Stella, and me hiding in a cave: