Experiencing White Sands & Guadalupe Mountains National Parks
It’s been a while since we got back (Spent the past month getting our house prepped to sell.) and I thought I’d share some of our experiences on our trip from the frozen tundra of Minnesota to sunny Texas and New Mexico back in March. We enjoyed all of the parks and the towns around them – we’d definitely include them in future plans for warm-weather winter destinations.
The Trip South
Actually, the weather in Minnesota cooperated and it was above freezing the day before (and night) we left, allowing us to sanitize and fill the water system at home rather than after reaching warmer weather. It would’ve been a lot harder to get everything checked out and set up properly at the end of a 600-mile travel day. We took I-35 south from Minnesota to Wichita the first day and stayed at All Seasons RV Park (allseasonsrvcampground.com) in Goddard, KS, just west of the city. Nice park that’s open all year.
One thing we hadn’t realized before the trip was that I-35/40/70 is the Kansas Turnpike, a toll road, and that it uses a different transponder than the I-Pass we have used on toll roads in Illinois, Indiana and Ohio. If we had a KTAG or other compatible transponder we would have saved half of the $70 or so it cost us round trip. Oh well, live and learn.
White Sands National Park
From Wichita we headed west on US-400, then US-54 to Alamogordo, NM, just east of White Sands National Park. The area is also home to White Sands Missile Range and Holloman Air Force Base, so Alamogordo is a fairly decent-sized city with a full range of amenities. We camped at Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, about 5 miles south of the city at the base of the Sacramento Mountains. Note that White Sands doesn’t have a drive-in campground and it’s backcountry sites are currently closed for rehabilitation. Check here for more information.
White Sands is about 15 miles southwest of Alamogordo on US-70. The Visitors Center is right on the highway and is a cool-looking adobe building. In it you can find park rangers and the usual book store and souvenir shop, where you can rent a saucer if you choose to try sliding on the dunes.
They were right when the named the park, the sands are dazzlingly white! Bring your sunglasses and sunscreen because the sand reflects a lot of the sun’s ray’s back up at you making for a double danger of sunburn. There aren’t a lot of hiking trails in the park and most of them are fairly short. We took the misleadingly named Alkali Flat trail, a 5-mile loop through the dunes that felt longer than it was. Walking on flat sand isn’t always easy, but on this trail you are going up or down a 50 foot high dune every 1-200 yards. The trail is anything but flat, but it is a great way to get a feeling for being in the middle of a desert (Which you are!).
Check out our White Sands pictures here.
Guadalupe Mountains National Park
From Alamogordo we drove about four hours to Guadalupe Mountains National Park, on the Texas-New Mexico border, home to the four highest mountains in Texas, with Guadalupe Peak checking in at nearly 9,000 feet. We stayed at Pine Springs campground, which has 13 paved RV-only sites and 20 tent-only sites, located right by the trailhead to Guadalupe Peak and several other popular trails. The mountains tower over the campground, making it special in spite of the fact that we were basically camped on a parking lot. Pine Springs doesn’t have hookups, but with no trees, the solar output was the best we’d ever had and water is available right there.
The Guadalupe Mountains sit in the middle of the Chihuahuan desert and are part of an ancient reef complex that is mostly buried. The area is filled with fossils from that reef, many of which are exposed. We chose to hike in the McKittrick Canyon area, sometimes called the prettiest spot in Texas, to the Pratt Cabin and the Grotto. The trail follows a stream bed which goes from dry to flowing and back to dry again several times. The water from the stream allows a wide variety of vegetation to grow in the canyon, including pines, making a sharp contrast to the arid desert surrounding it.
You can check all of our Guadalupe Mountains pictures here.
Wrapping it up
All-in-all we liked both White Sands and Guadalupe Mountains National Parks and would put them on the list to return to one day. Both are great places to visit in the winter, probably less enjoyable in the summer when desert temperatures get high. We’ll be adding galleries of pictures from both parks in the near future.
Stay tuned for Part 2 where we’ll get into our visit to Carlsbad Caverns and Big Bend National Parks.
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