Road Trip: Phoenix to Alamogordo

A friend of mine once told me about his spring break down in Rocky Point. He had taken a "drunk bus" along with a bunch of other ASU students down there, and there the travel company kept the supply of alcohol flowing to the extent that many students stayed drunk for a week. As this is my last spring, I debated for a moment, doing the whole Rocky point thing, and rejected it after a few seconds thought. Instead, Saori and I set out for the road less traveled, a loop which would take us through north and south Arizona and New Mexico.

We left Sunday afternoon, after my friends in Tucson agreed to host us for the night at the last minute. Sally and Jonathan lent us their minivan for the trip, which made the drive a lot more comfortable and convenient. We knew were headed to white sands national monument, but not a whole else other than some vauge destinations in New Mexico. Just outside of Tucson, we pulled into a Wal-Mart to see if they had sleds. We had it in mind to go sledding on the sand dunes once we arrived. No luck. The Wal-Mart was located in an edge city which bore a strikingly depressing resemblance to north Scottsdale. Actually on this trip, we saw many cities which had parts just like north Scottsdale, almost to the point where you could predict the stores in the shopping center: you had your Starbucks Coffee, the Michaels and WorldMarket, the BestBuy, the fresh mexican food chain, etc.

Leaving Wal-Mart behind, we drove up to Gates Pass, a high mountain pass which overlooks Tucson in the West. From there, Saori and I and another two dozen people watched the sun set across the valley laid out below us. It was slow, serene, and beautiful. It made me happy and hopeful, that these families and people of all sorts would make the effort to drive out to this spot, just to see something beautiful and natural. It never fails to amaze me either, the absolutely perfect blending of colors in the sky, the unbelievably crisp silhouettes of saguaros and paloverde trees against the sky. These are the things you really appreciate after working with photoshop for awhile.

After admiring the sunset, we drove into town to meet Cassie and Kevin at a Korean BBQ / Japanese restaurant. Soon after, we were joined by Whitney and a new friend of hers, Billy whom she knew from working at Blockbuster. We split a grill-it-yourself thing and also got a bit of sushi. It was really fun to see them again and to hear what was going on in their lives. There was a party of asians who at one point burst into song which was very strange. We spent that night at Cassie's apartment, crashing on the couch.

Monday morning saw us on the road again around 9 AM. Somehow, we never managed to get up before then the entire trip. We drove out of Tucson and headed east, a route I'd never taken before. I realized to my surprise, that I actually didn't mind the driving. I was good for several hours nonstop, traversing the countryside that I'd never seen before. It was a lot easier than the hellishly boring flatland between Phoenix and Tucson. Saori loves Tucson, she likes the greenery, and the small-town feel it has. It has its charm, but it still feels very slow and provincial to me.

We stopped at a few places along the way to New Mexico, rest stops to enjoy the scenery, little towns just to see what was there, that kind of thing. We took turns driving, and finally a bit after 5 PM, we passed through Las Cruces and into the White Sands Missile Range. I saw a sign for a museum on the base, so we turned off the main road and followed a single track to an army base at the edge of a ridge. Signs on the side of the road warned us to stay on the road to avoid live ordinance which might be around. At the gate, we realized the museum just closed, but talking to the checkpoint guards, we learned we could still drive in and see the outdoor missile park. The only thing was they wanted to check our vehicle registration and proof of insurance. I had a few panicked moments as I dug through the glove compartment of our borrowed vehicle, but both documents were sanely together in a single flip open view folder. They gave us a little sheet for our windshield and we drove into the base.

The weather was cool, but not cold, and the sky was a bit overcast when we went out to walk around. They had a lot of very old missile casings, from the experimental V-2s patterned on the German missile of WWII to some very large missiles designed to be tipped with nuclear warheads. They also had a Fat Man casing, which was identical to the one that housed the nuclear bomb that destroyed Nagasaki. Saori was shocked at how small it was, and how the amount of plutonium it had taken was smaller than a soccer ball.

We pressed on the dune park, getting in an hour before sunset. White Sands National Monument is definitly one of the more surreal places I've ever been. The monument is actually only half of the dune field, as the other half is on the missile range. Occasionally, they close the road between Las Cruces and Alamogordo during missile tests. Geographically, the dune field is in the middle of an even more massive flat valley, which stretches over 50 miles in all directions. The sand is white because its all gypsum sand, and its the slightly off-white bone or milk color.

When we first arrived, I tossed my sandals and walked around the dunes barefoot. The sand was cold. We had stopped at the first place to park, too eager to get onto the dunes, but then we drove on a little further to find a more quiet spot. There, on top of the white sandy dunes, we watched the sun set in the distance behind the mountains. The sand turned orange, then pink as the sun went down, casting incredible patterns. We sat for awhile until the park ranger drove by, informing everyone via megaphone that the park was locking its doors at 8 PM. I checked my watch. 6:30. No problem. The ranger continued. "The time is now 7:33." I realized that I'd forgotten to take the time change into account. We raced back across the dark dunes back to the van, and barely made it out of the park on time.

We got into Alamogordo and started looking for hotels. Saori had picked up a coupon book at one of the places we stopped and she was thumbing through it looking for cheap rooms. On a whim, we decided to grab one of the tiny motels off the main strip. I liked the name: "The White Sands Motel." It was run by an Indian woman (ALL of those motels seemed to be run by immigrants) who gave us a room for under $30. It was perfect for us. Easy, cheap, clean. The furniture was old, and the room smelled of old smoke but it had that great cheesy, quirky quality to it. We dropped our stuff and went out for fried chicken. Afterwards, we found a Big5 Sports. The sales guy kept calling me "bro" and sold us a plastic toboggan for the dunes. I asked about missile testing, as he told us about a few months ago, there had a been a series of tests the space of a few hours that caused earthquakes and shock waves to hit the town, rattling windows, and knocking all the shoeboxes off the back wall. Impacts like that can only be caused by nuclear weapons at that distance.

Tuesday morning, we grabbed a coffee and cinnamon roll at the motel office and drove back out to White Sands national monument. There, we drove to the center of the park and found the main sledding hill. Sledding on sand dunes is not as fun as it sounds, mostly because the sand just doesn't move fast enough. Saori and I were too heavy to ride the sled together- we just buried it in the sand build up in front. Everyone else had the disc sleds, mostly kids, so they were pretty light and they were still just kind of poking down the dune. It was fun anyway, and tiring trekking up the dune. After awhile we decided just to head out and walk out among the dunes.

Oddly, there was flooding in the area, so there were a few places with huge standing pools of crystal clear water a few inches deep. The gypsum sand gets really weird in these cases. It sometimes formed air pockets below the surface forming these weird rippling tubes, walking on saturated gypsum mud felt like walking on a damp thick carpeting. There was also these two layers of red and green which we figured were probably algae.

Anyway, it was out there that we found the places that were unmarked by footprints. There was the surreality we had looked for- where all you could see was the deep blue of a cloudless sky, and the blinding creamy white of the sand, thats all, two color fields. We trekked around taking photos and running down the dunes until our eyes began to burn with the glare.