I’m not sure where I heard White Sands National Park had 700 foot sand dunes, but the dunes were 60 feet high or so, quite the difference. Since I already wrote about the dunes potentially being 700 feet high, I thought about lying about it here, then if anyone ever called me on it I could just say “I guess you just must not have hiked far enough to see the big 700 footer. It was really cool.”
In actuality, Monahans Sandhills State Park in Texas has larger dunes, but receives far fewer visitors per year, and so I think it is mainly a marketing problem for Texas to deal with, but maybe they don’t want anyone to visit.
On the whole, White Sands was a bit underwhelming, but possibly only because my expectations were 700 feet high. But while I’d betrayed my lifelong instinct to keep expectations so low that anything short of disaster results in pleasant surprise, a combination of rarity and oddity pervades the dunes, qualities which in this case (and often elsewhere) lead to a somewhat baffling beauty.
True to its name, the dunes at White Sands were white, or at least as white as the brand of Sherwin-Williams off-white paint known as Pearly White. The sand was also much finer than the dunes at Monahans, and so it packed down much more tightly, making it easier to walk on—it basically held your footing and they’d even made a road out of it through the park that they plough when the wind blizzards the sand across the road. Those properties also made it slightly quicker for sledding, but I’ve found that sand sledding isn’t even a close second to sledding on snow, and so I skipped it.
The sand at White Sands is actually gypsum—used in the stuff your walls are likely made of (drywall, plaster, but also in some toothpastes, so be sure to grab a mouthful if you visit!). White Sands is the largest gypsum dune field in the world, and so of course people mined the shit out of it until it was made a national park.
In the end I spent just a couple hours at White Sands, then high-tailed it 400 miles to Tonto National Forest, Arizona, to Tortilla Campground. Fifty miles east of Tortilla Campground, I also passed through Globe, AZ, an old mining town that still operates open-pit copper mines and employs a not insignificant population of the town in the process. Heading into Tonto National Forest after sunset, the final 10 miles into the forest took 40 minutes to drive, 15-25 mph on a road winding around mountains and pulling U’s left and right while the dark behemoths loomed somewhere above my truck beyond the sightline of the windshield.
The campground is perfectly nestled in a canyon, about two miles from Canyon Lake, in fact, and a mile from a town called Tortilla Flats, population 7. The “town” consists of a bar/restaurant with live music, a gift shop, and an ice cream shop. It felt odd to find this in a national forest, but Phoenix is only 50 miles from here and so this forest actually gets used quite a bit, and nearby Canyon Lake has a marina and dozens of boats in dock that are owned by locals, so the Flats get a lot of traffic as the only game in town.
One-hundred and forty miles southeast of Phoenix, I finally started to see saguaro cactuses, the kind with the sometimes tiny t-rex arms but also known as the “sage of the desert” and which grow up to 60 feet tall as the largest cactus in the United States. Soon they were everywhere, hundreds of them climbing up the sides of the mountains as if to escape the heat that saturates this part of the country much of the year. But for now in January, the weather calls for low- to mid-70s this week, while the cool overnight temps mean virtually no bugs. It’s a great time of year to camp/live and work from your camper.
Today I hiked a few miles in a dry riverbed at the bottom of the canyon the campground is situated in, a slow go plodding along while balancing on boulders and treading river bottom pebbles. Then, through the miracle of Starlink, I watched Detroit lose to the 49ers in a travesty for the motor city team. I felt better after grilling a steak for dinner outside, and since the sun tired me out again, I won’t be up much longer.
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