August 30, 2006 We had made the decision at dinner the night before to leave El Paso, TX and drive up to Alamogordo, New Mexico to stay the night. This would mean that we'd miss some of the sights between El Paso and Alamogordo, but we'd get to backtrack at least a little bit the next morning to visit White Sands. There really isn't much between El Paso and Alamogordo... it's all owned by the military anyway so it's not like we could have gone anywhere but the road.

These first few photos here were shot at the White Sands entrance with a Lensbaby 2.0 on my Fuji S3 Pro digital SLR. The Lensbaby is a lens with a mini-bellows, and so it acts kind of like a mini-view camera and has that exaggerated shallow depth of field. Sometimes it makes things look like little models in a diorama.

More shots with the Lensbaby, only this time we've arrived in the center of White Sands, about 7 miles from the entrance.

I'm not going to claim to be an expert on why White Sands is the way it is. But I do know the following: White Sands isn't really made of sand, it's made of Gypsum, which is kind of a translucent white. I guess it has something to do with this being a large Gypsum deposit (go to Google Maps and switch to Satellite and type in "White Sands" and you'll see this huge deposit from space), and the regular "sand" blows off with the wind while the heavier Gypsum stays behind. I'mm wondering if that is why some of the clouds look kind of "red"... it's possibly the dust and sand that blows off the desert and into the air...

Yes, that's me to the left, and Carl is far left.

The only large deposit of "sand" is in the center parking area. Cars and people bring in sand and dirt, and dying plants and animals I'm sure contribute to the darker color as well, as this can found not just in the parking areas but in the lower areas of the sand dunes.

One of the other big differences between White Sands and other deserts is that the dunes of Gypsum do not kill the trees and large shrubs that they cover... the vegetation will literally continue to live, as long as some of their branches can stick out of the dunes.

The 7 shots with the dark vignetting are photos taken with the Holga medium format (120 film) camera. The Holga doesn't allow for any real aperture or shutter control, but the photos have a unique aesthetic. I used expired Kodak Ektachrome 100 slide film. The Gypsum was so reflective that the photos came out overexposed even at this slow speed.

You might be wondering why there is so much WATER in my photos of White Sands. Well, turns out it rained so much the weeks before we got out there, that it was taking longer than normal for the water to drain away. Turns out this is actually quite common in west Texas and New Mexico... you will often find flood markers along the side of the road in the middle of nowhere in what appears to be relatively flat country. It's a little disconcerting since those flood markers go up to 6 feet!

We headed out of White Sands and made our way north along Route 54.

Out of the desert of White Sands and into the Valley of Fire's blackness.

We arrived at a huge ancient lava flow called "The Valley of Fires". It's north of White Sands and appears like a long black lake on satellite maps. This is far from a lake, the whole area was once an open cauldron of hot lava. Today its black igneous rock is lush with flowers and plants. It is so thick with flora, that you might think you were in Hawai'i, if it weren't for the very dry environment and heat.

We departed the Valley of Fires and drove off in search of the Very Large Array, or VLA. Here are some shots I took from the car while on our hunt for the VLA. They are Holga shots, and some telephoto shots with my Nikkor 70-210mm telephoto on the Fuji S3 Pro.

The VLA is a huge array of radio telescopes that look deeper into space than any observatory telescope by looking not for visual light, but rather radio signals that "draw" the image of stars and other objects. There are only a few other arrays of radio telescopes like it in the world.

We managed to eventually find the VLA, hanging out in the wide flat plains around the city of Magdelena, NM. If it weren't for the clouds, we would've gotten much better shots of these huge telescopes. After this, it was just too dark to shoot much else. We packed up our equipment and drove a couple hours or so to Roswell to stay the night.

Travel with us to Day 4