The Road the Sand Takes Back

The plow moves slow down the paved lane, blade angled, pushing a drift of white off the asphalt and into the low scrub that lines the shoulder. The drift is gypsum sand, fine as powdered milk. By mid-morning the wind will build a new ripple across the lane, and by evening the road will be nothing but a suggestion.

This is the road into White Sands, and the road has to be earned.

There is no mountain pass to clear, no ice to salt, no season when the plow can be put away. The sand comes all year. It slides down the long flank of the San Andres, washes through arroyos during the summer rains, and dries into a salt-white grit that the wind picks up and moves as casually as a hand pushes dust off a table. The road is a temporary arrangement between the park and the dunes, renewed every morning before the first car arrives.

A Basin Full of Light

The San Andres Mountains run north and south along the west side of the Tularosa Basin, and their western slopes are dry, rough country. But it is the eastern faces, the ones that overlook this valley, that give the basin its strange white floor. Rain and meltwater work through the mountains, dissolving gypsum out of the ancient sea beds and carrying it down. The water pools in the broad, shallow basin, where the heat of the desert pulls it back into the sky and leaves the gypsum behind. The process has been running for ten thousand years or more, and it is still running. There is no end to the source.

Stand in the basin at the end of a calm afternoon, when the wind lays down, and the whole world seems to glow from underneath. The dunes are soft white, the color of bone left in the sun, and they hold the low light the way a limestone cliff does. The San Andres stand dark above them, the ridges turning purple as the sun drops, and the white dunes at their feet pick up the last light and hold it for a long time after the mountain shadows have gone dark.

The road runs straight into this. It is a black ribbon laid across a white ocean. The pavement is ordinary asphalt, but it looks out of place, a piece of the city dropped into a landscape that never asked for it. In the mornings the sand drifts across it in smooth, curved waves. The plow cuts through them, leaving a clean strip about the width of a single lane, and the edges of that strip are sharp, as if the road has been cut with a knife.

The Dunes Are Not Frozen

People think of a dune as a pile, a fixed thing to climb and slide down. But a dune is a wave, not a hill. It is the sand moving in place, pushed by the wind up one slope, over the crest, and down the other side. The dune itself stays in roughly the same spot for a while, but the sand is always on the move. The road crosses several of these moving shapes, and that is why it must be plowed. The wind does not ask permission.

The plow is not trying to remove all the sand, because that would be impossible, and it would fight against a force that has all day and all night to redo the work. The plow simply makes the road passable, cutting through the drifts, scraping the pavement down until the tires can grip. The sand that is pushed to the side becomes part of the dunes again. Nothing is wasted. The gypsum is always returning to itself.

Out among the dunes, the wind shapes everything. The crests are crisp, fine lines, like the edge of a sheet of paper. The windward slopes are smooth and rounded, with a surface that looks the way a sand dollar feels. The leeward slopes are steeper, and the sand there is ridged by thin, delicate patterns that last only minutes. A footprint on one side of a dune will be gone by the next morning. On the other side it may stay for weeks, softened into a shallow, vague hollow that looks like a geological feature.

Life in the White

The road also marks the frontier of what can survive here. The dunes are not empty. The soaptree yucca grows out of the white, and where a dune moves over it, the yucca sends out new stems, growing taller, fighting to keep its leaves in the light. Some of these yucca stand ten feet above the sand, their trunks buried and invisible, their crowns just breaking the surface. The road cuts through these stands, and along the shoulder there are places where the plow has carved through a dune and exposed the long, pale roots of the grass that was living underneath.

At night, when the plow is parked and the visitors have gone, the dunes belong to the animals that have learned to read the white. The kit fox walks the ridges, leaving small, crisp tracks that the morning wind will erase. A pocket mouse darts between the yucca. Somewhere in the basin a pale lizard, the color of the gypsum itself, dozes on a bare patch of sand, invisible until it moves. The road becomes a kind of hunting trail, an easy walkway across a grass that is always trying to drift over it.

The people who tend this road know it is temporary. They are merely keeping it at bay for the length of a visitor's drive. The road is an agreement, renewed daily, that for a few hours the desert will let people see what it has built. The plow clears the way, the cars roll out to the heart of the dunes, and then the cars go back. By nightfall the sand is starting to cover the tracks again, and the road is slowly, weightlessly, disappearing under the white.

The San Andres keep standing there, patient and dark, as the wind moves their old stones down into the basin and the dunes keep climbing the road. The plow will come again in the morning. It is the only way in.

White Sands National Park

Photos: dconvertini (CC BY-SA 2.0)