White Sands National Park, New Mexico

Explore the beautiful, minimalist landscape of New Mexico’s White Sands National Park, a dramatic environment of shifting contrasts, lighting, patterns and textures with a backdrop of the rugged San Andres and Sacramento Mountains. The night sky in this part of the Southwest is one of the darkest in the nation. If you are interested in doing some astrophotography, that can be included in the schedule. In 2019, human footprints spanning from 23,000 – 21,000 years ago were discovered in the park (reported in 2021), dating human occupation of North America nearly 10,000 years earlier than thought. The footprints were discovered in multiple layers of sediment from the periodic drying of the glacial lake that once existed in the Tularosa Basin before the dunes. We’ll also have a “Pistachios and Petroglyphs” day, traveling north a few miles to tour the Heart of the Desert Pistachio farm and the Three Rivers Petroglyph site where there are 21,000 petroglyphs easily viewed and photographed from a well-established loop trail about 1 mile long.