SATURDAY, September
29
INTERNATIONAL SPACE
MUSEUM
SUNSET &
MOONRISE AT WHITE SANDS
Click HERE to see
all of today’s pictures
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| International Space Hall of Fame & Museum |
We have a full day ahead of us, the rain
stopped falling around midnight, the skies have cleared and it is a gloriously
beautiful morning! By the time I update
everything on-line over at the clubhouse, draw a picture that I don’t finish
coloring, and eat breakfast, it is 9:20 when we leave to spend much of the day
at the International Space Hall of Fame and Museum. We visited here 18 years ago when the boys
were quite young, but Jed was already interested in Space! The museum is located high on the hill
overlooking the city – the mirrored outside walls reflect the clouds and skies
beautifully!
Rick and I purchased combo tickets to
include an IMAX movie, plus additional tickets for the 1pm planetarium show “9
Planets & Counting”. The IMAX show
is on Hubble and at 2pm. So….we have 2 ½
hours to explore the museum, before catching a bite to eat at the truck before
the planetarium show.
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| NASA won't be hiring us to land the Shuttle! |
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| In the Gemini capsule! |
The museum is designed to be viewed from
top to bottom. Elevators carry you to
the top floor, and you work your way down on ramps through the various exhibits:
Why Tularosa Basin and New Mexico? Icons of Exploration (celebrated artifacts
such as moon rocks and replicas of spacecraft).
Living and Working in Space. (Rick and I piloted a shuttle landing...poorly). Rockets (including the German influences) Satellites. New Mexico Space Science and the X Prize
& Commercial Space. Yesterday’s
Tomorrows (the future as perceived by our culture 50 years ago); and
Meteorites. Outside the museum exhibits
included the Daisy Track (used to study the body’s tolerance to G-Forces), the
Memorial Garden for astronauts killed in Apollo and shuttle missions, as well
as the burial site of Ham the AstroChimp. We SLOWLY worked our way down,
reading much! In between the levels are
framed pictures of the over 150 men and women in the Space Hall of Fame,
ranging from old-timers such as Copernicus and Galileo to some of the most
recent Shuttle commanders.
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| The Space Relics Park from the top floor of museum. |
At 12:30 and somewhere in the middle of
level 2, we realized we needed to break, grab some lunch, and walk down the hill
to the Planetarium and IMAX theater.
The parking lot was relatively empty – in fact, we probably only
encountered three or four other groups inside the museum. I think we are going to like very much the
benefits of traveling in the off season!!
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| Web Photo of Orion Nebula from Hubble |
The
Nine Planets and Counting Planetarium show was well done and interesting. We were sitting off to the side which made it
difficult to see some of the pictures off to the one side. For the IMAX show, we moved closer to the
middle and that was much better. The
IMAX show on the Hubble Space Telescope was fantastic. Huge IMAX screen size and images taken by
Hubble that carried us into the middle of the Orion Nebula and to the outer
edges of the universe. Also footage of
the last Shuttle mission dedicated to repair and service Hubble before the end
of the shuttle program. We really
enjoyed both movies!
Back up to the museum to finish up, a look
through the gift shop, and then out to the outside exhibits. By 4pm we were ready to leave! Finally!
Quick dinner of burritos from egg, canned
chicken, and leftovers beans & salsa in the fridge. Quick and easy!
We left around 5:40p to head back down to
White Sands for our third and final visit!
The skies are clear except for scattered clouds here and there and a
band of clouds over the Sacramento Mts.
Our hopes are for a more colorful sunset and a moon rise to experience
the moon on the dunes. We drove to the
Nature Trail area and walked the last part of the trail backwards to a high
point and large tracks of dunes without plants.
By going backwards, we also avoided the Park Service led Hike taking
place in the same area.
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| Just prior to sunset, there was a rainbow dropping down to the ground in the south. |
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| Moon in the yucca |
We scored a winning doubleheader! I ran all over our area to find yucca plants,
cottonwoods, old stumps, etc. to use for foreground in sunset pictures, and
then moon rise pictures. My big
regret? I left the tripod in the
truck!! And by the time the moon was
fairly high, it was too dark to hold the camera as still as I would have
liked. And we had to leave by 7:45 as
they close the park gates at 8p. Still,
we could see our shadows on the sand, and were able to experience a little of
the moon on the white expanse of gypsum.
Drive back into Alamogordo to the light of
the full moon. We move again tomorrow – down
to Las Cruces and our next Habitat experience!
We are ready!
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| By the light of the rising moon! |
FRIDAY, September 28
WHITE
SANDS NATIONAL MONUMENT
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| On top of the gypsum at White Sands NM |
Today we played in the ‘snow’ and we did
it in bare feet!! That’s what many of my
pictures look like during our daytime visit to White Sands. The skies were ugly today. (Well, ugly in the
sense that we didn’t have bright blue clear skies.) Even though the forecast was only 20% chance
of rain, the sky was overcast this morning and just got blacker and blacker as
the day progressed. As I write about
4:30p, it has been raining steadily for the past hour and half: rain the
Tularosa Basin can really use at the end of a long and dry monsoon season. But….we got home to our trailer just as the
first sprinkles began to fall!
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| Piles of sand from the sand plow. |
The dunes shift, especially in the spring
when the winds are the greatest, up to 30’ a year – always moving in the
prevailing southwest to northeast direction.
Because of this, the main dune road is paved only for the first 3 miles;
after that you are driving on packed gypsum sand! And it is a hard surface, but one easily broken
down by rain. They plow the road
frequently with a snow plow to keep the sand in check. You could tell they had done sections just
this morning, including large parking lots which had the telltale mounds of
‘snow sand’ in the corners.
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| Visitor Center at White Sands is built in southwest adobe style. |
Our first stop was the Visitor Center and
a stamp in my National Parks Passbook.
We explored the various exhibits, watched an excellent 17 minute movie
(with awesome time-lapse photography) on the formation of the dunes, and then
made a few purchases in the gift store next door. The Visitor Center is all adobe, southwest
architecture – it appears to be part of the landscape!
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| THIS is a picnic area! |
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| Trail Marker |
A slower drive in this morning (unlike
last night’s race to get to the Sunset Stroll on time!). We stopped at a few more of the interpretive
signs, visited the picnic area. This
looked to me somewhat like an image out of a sci-fi film: little curved
shelters scattered amidst a barren white plain.
Picnic on Tatooine in Star Wars, perhaps? We continued on past the strenuous five mile
hike out to the Alkali Flats (up dune, down dune, up dune, down dune – more work
than we wanted today, especially with ugly skies!) We stopped at the Backcountry Camper Parking
because this is where Jed camped a couple years ago when he visited the
area. If I remember correctly, Jed was
in site 5-6-or-7, which are on the farthest point of the circle. Rick and I trekked only so far as Campsite 1
and that ended up being over a mile roundtrip.
Out on this section of the dunes, you truly feel encased in a sea of
white waves – grasses and plants in the inter-dune area, but the dunes
themselves are plant-free for the most part.
I finally put my camera on the ‘snow’ setting, hoping to adjust for the
brilliant lighting. The sky with its
dark clouds added a different dimension from blue skies. Since it is impossible to make a ‘trail’ over
the dunes, you simply follow marker poles from one to another. Each pole has an arrow pointing the direction
to the next one, you get it in your sights, and off you trek! The initial trailhead also had GPS
coordinates for each campsite – modern orienteering at its best! We grabbed a little bite to eat out near
campsite #1, and the token picture.
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| A sea of white and angry skies! |
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| Nature Trail was covered with Yellow Primrose in bloom. |
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| Only the tops of the cottonwoods appear above the dunes. |
Back in the road toward the entrance to
stop at the Nature Trail Basin Hike – a one mile trip led by Katy the Kit Fox
(the signs are all as if Katy is telling the story!) The kit fox, at just under 5 pounds, is the
largest full time mammal in the park.
Much of the hike was explaining how the animals adapt to a waterless
environment and to the white habitat.
Biologists love it because they have been able to track animal
adaptation in rapid time. Mice, lizards,
snakes, etc. have all adapted with whiter skins and furs in this area.
Back to the trailer for a little
relaxation time listening to the rain fall!
Around 4:30 we take off for an early dinner at Applebee’s! We want to try out the 2-for-$20 special Rick
has heard advertised on TV! Ended up a
good meal, although my Sangria was not cheap!
Rick got a beer on the happy hour special. We also got an appetizer in with the
deal.
Still raining when we left the restaurant
at 6p, and we needed to walk off our dinner.
We drove north on White Sands Blvd. in search of a possible mall, but
never found one. So…back to the Wal-Mart
to wander for abit. Naturally we ended
up purchasing a few things!
Evening spent talking on the phone with Baker City and relaxing! I did wander over to the clubhouse a few
times to connect to the internet again. The rain finally slowed down around midnight. Space Museum in the morning and perhaps clear skies!
THURSDAY,
September 27
Albuquerque
(Edgewood) to Alamogordo, New Mexico
Click HERE to view today's pictures
Back to a travel day today! We relax a little inside Randy’s and then go
into action to finish packing up the trailer for travel again! We have accumulated a few new things while in
Albuquerque and have to find room for everything! (Some of it is stuff Mom R is sending home
with us!)
On the road by 9:20 with a stop at the
Subway on Route 66 to pick up our free 6” sub sandwiches – our prize from
giving blood a couple weeks ago! They
were only good at the Edgewood Subway, so it was time to use them. Then on to I-40 for a few short miles to
Moriarty, and down Hwy 41 toward Estancia, where Patty teaches school. This is flat land….marked with scattered piñon
pines or junipers, and a short round cedar tree. Estancia is prime pinto bean country, but we
also pass several corn fields. I don’t
think I would recognize a pinto bean farm if I saw one!
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| Park in Corrizozo for lunch stop |
Onto Hwy 60 for two miles, and then south
again on State Route 42 toward Corona – which is pretty much out in the middle
of nowhere! We pass through Cedarvale,
which is our hint that all those trees just might be a variety of cedar! None of them are over 15’ tall – and very
round. We are stopped for road
construction at one point – major work being down on Hwy 54, the major north
south highway from Corona to Carrizozo and south to Alamogordo.
Into Carrizozo at 12:30. This is the county seat for Lincoln County,
home of Capitan Mts. and Smokey the Bear fame.
Also a major link for Ruidoso, horse racing and casino locale up in the
mountains. We found a gas station market
to pick up some drinks, and then a small park honoring the first governor of
New Mexico, who hailed from Carrizozo.
There we ate our sandwiches!
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| White Sands RV Park site |
Another hour into Alamogordo, driving
along the west side of the Sacramento Mountains, which form the eastern border
of the Tularosa Basin – a huge “bathtub” which also contains all of the White
Sands deposits. We found White Sands RV
Community Park – a large mobile home park that also has about 85 temporary RV
sites. Pretty nice setup – shaded tables,
concrete pads, trees, and we are right next to the clubhouse with swimming
pool, etc. Only downside? I can’t get internet in the trailer – I have
to go to the clubhouse and it closes at 5pm.
However, I did find that I can sit outside and get the free internet
there! So, I am writing tonight in the
trailer and will post everything in the morning!
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| Sun should set in the notch, but too many clouds! |
Around 5:15 we take off to drive down to
White Sands National Monument – and a chance to maybe catch the full moon. Unfortunately, the skies are dark and black
with clouds, but there is also a Sunset Stroll to take in, which should provide
a little information for us about the park!
By the time we stopped to get gas, we were a little late arriving at the
stroll, but the ranger was just leaving the parking area and we were able to
quickly slide right on it with 3 other couples.
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| Yucca releasing its seeds |
White Sands National Monument is a small
slice of the dunes out of the White Sands Missile Range. When the military decides it no longer needs
the range, ALL the dunes will revert to the national monument. It is protected, all 275 square miles of
dunes. The next largest gypsum dunes in
the world are in northern Mexico – at 8 square miles! That puts the extent of White Sands into
perspective!
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| Darkling beetles were everywhere! |
We “strolled” through the dunes, as our
ranger pointed out various plants, animals, and adaptations that both have made
to life in a desert climate – as well as a shifting and constantly moving
environment! We saw little insects, lizards,
coyote skat, flowers, skunk-bush sumas, and cottonwood trees. The latter two plants create large pillars of
gypsum held within root systems. Gypsum
sand does not get hot to the touch like beach sand, so it feels “cool”, even in
the heart of the summer, to walk on it barefoot.
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| Sunset glow on the San Andres Mts. |
We didn’t get much of a sunset, and didn’t
see the moon until we were leaving. A
few dark orange spots among the mountains as we drove back out the road. Our ranger told us where to see the moon on
the sands Friday or Saturday nights, even though we haven’t been able to sign
up for the hike or bike ride.
Back into town, quick trip to Wal-Mart for
some ice cream sandwiches, and then evening of computer (me) and football
watching (Rick). Tomorrow back to White Sands in the day time!
