Full Moon over White Sands

I’ve been to White Sands National Monument two times: once two years ago, en route to a Grand Canyon solo, and again last spring on a road trip with my mom. On the second visit, a stiff wind blew sand into our eyes. Blown sand filled the air like fog; we could see no more than 20 feet ahead of us. So I’ll tell you about the solo hike, when all the stars (moons) aligned.

White Sands is spectacular. It looks like another planet, whitest white, windswept and unmarked. People are wont to say, “This looks like that movie..uh, what's it called.” My friend Mike said, on seeing a photo, “Is that where they filmed the video for Boyz II Men’s ‘Water Runs Dry?'”

You never know.

On a fine spring day, I cut north into New Mexico from West Texas. Driving down from Lac Cruces, the Chihuahuan desert stretched scrubby and bald in all directions, dropping no hints of its secret jewel, a 275-square mile dunefield, the largest of its kind in the world. Suddenly bone-white hills of sand cropped up to the north. They accrued quickly, until the whole viewshed left of the highway had gone white.

Entering the park felt like driving into the aftermath of a snowstorm. Wind dusted the road with a coating of sand. Sand filled the shoulders and swirled in the parking lot. In every direction were dunes, one upon the next, in radiant white silence.

A sign on the welcome center desk informed me that camping was full. I’d expected as much; the monument has ten backcountry campsites and takes no reservations. And I’d arrived at six pm. And it was a Saturday on the cusp of summer—and a full moon.

“Will you be staying for the moon festivities?” the ranger asked as he gave me a list of camping options. “If so, you might want to try Oliver Lee State Park. Their gates’ll be open after dark.”

Festivities? What did that mean?

In keeping with one of my core travel values, “Don’t waste good daylight planning,” I gave up after two failed calls to the state park, which appeared to operate on a voicemail-only system. I headed for the longest hiking route the park offered, a five-miler called the Alkali Flats Trail. The guide specified that lest one be misled, the trail was not flat. At the trailhead was a large, anxious poster about dehydration and route-finding in a landscape where mammalian tracks are summarily erased by wind. DON’T RELY ON FOOTPRINTS! it read. KEEP A TRAIL MARKER IN SIGHT AT ALL TIMES.     

Beside the parking lot, little kids and frat boys careened down a large dune on rented sleds. I loaded my daypack with two liters of water, an emergen-c, a Snickers bar and apple, a headlamp and my iPhone and two jackets (light down, rain shell). Oh, and three bandaids. That seemed like ample overpreparedness. I started off.

Just past the trailhead a group of small children was sledding a begrimed dune.

“Matthias!” the kids were calling. “Matthias! Matthias!”

A small boy with his saucer caught in a rut halfway down looked up at them.

“What!” he called back irritably.

“Aren’t you glad you came with us?”

I missed his answer, or perhaps he gave none.

The trail was marked by steel rails plunged deep in the sand. They were orange with a reflective square and a black diamond. As you reached one, you could see the next, whether it was a number of yards away or at the top of the following dune. To walk required a half-slide, sinking and skiing, down a dune, and then a hard slippery slog up the next. The movement felt good.

Early on I passed kids sledding, families with chairs and camp tables perched on dunes, and couples leaned into each other like nesting birds. Finally, half a mile in, I saw my favorite thing on the horizon: no one. And the view was unbelievable. Nothing but hills of white under a burning blue sky. So perfect, and all mine!

Then I noticed a guy behind me.

He wore jeans and a cowboy hat. He carried no pack, just a single-use bottle of water. Though the trail was only five miles long, it was described as “strenuous” with an estimated hike time of three hours. Idiot, I thought. Why can’t people read the signs and take care of themselves? Soon this guy would be asking me for some water and a band-aid, or worse: half my Snickers bar.

But then I had another thought, the kind of thought that often comes to me too late, when I’m already beyond earshot of the masses of people who could save my life.

What if this guy wasn’t a hiker at all?

What if he’d seen me enter the trail late in the day, obviously alone, wearing some booty shorts and a practically see-through tank top? It would be all too easy to rape me, strangle me, and leave me for dead in the dunes, with no witnesses and no evidence to speak of. 

My heart broke into a canter. Jesus, a murderer already? This park, I noticed, did not fulfill safety qualification number one, which is: “Must cost more than twenty dollars to enter, or be extremely remote, to rule out lazy and opportunistic serial killers.” The park was near several towns and, as a National Monument, it cost something like five bucks. Shit.

The feeling, which I call Solo Female Terror, was nothing new.

Once I had camped alone in a national forest in east Texas during the last weekend of hunting season. The campgrounds, bridges and parking lots were crowded with men—only men—in full-body camouflage; they all carried guns, and they looked at me in a way I’d like to forget. Once, hiking a remote canyon alone at dusk, I’d happened upon a family of black bears. Once I was chased down a trail by a guy on a motorcycle. I hid in deep brambles near a creek for half an hour, shaking with fear.

Yeah, in a couple years of moving through the outdoors alone, I’d had a number of near-scrapes and don’t-tell-my-mother-about-this scares. So I’d developed a two-pronged strategy for dealing with SFT.

One: Diminish risk. Go somewhere safer. Seek out another person. Hide, if necessary. And two: Calm the fuck down. Even if you’re in danger, you won’t get yourself anywhere in a state of heightened adrenaline and panic—at least until the moment when (if) you need to run. And in most cases, you’re safer than you think. 

That day in White Sands, I deployed both prongs. Spying a stray canoodling couple, I paused near them to “take photos” of a dune, allowing the cowboy to pass me. He didn’t look my way. I gave him a head start but stayed close enough that I could follow him. I took out my phone, zoomed in, and took a picture of his retreating form. “Evidence,” I told myself, as if my murderer would just leave my phone lying around. Come on - I've watched more Law & Order SVU than that.

Meanwhile I practiced breathing, counting to three for each inbreath and exhale. Cheryl Strayed has a great passage in Wild in which she describes telling herself she’s safe. I do some version of this every time I'm alone and afraid. You’re okay. You’re strong. No one’s going to hurt you.

After another mile of following him, I decided that if the cowboy wanted to assault me, he’d had ample opportunity by now. Nah, this was just a guy who took a five-mile desert hike with a twelve-ounce bottle of Dasani. He was clueless, I was paranoid, or both. I relaxed.

I noticed some footprints, toes and all, in the sand, and decided to finish the hike barefoot. The gypsum was fine and soft. It felt incredible under my feet.

The mid-point of the trail, where I stopped and ate a Snickers bar, touches the edge of the Alkali Flats, a broad expanse of sand surrounding shallow Lake Lucero. In the distance I could see the peaks of the San Andres Mountains. Back in the last ice age, this place—the Tularosa Basin—was a lush grassland ecosystem where megafauna like mammoths and giant sloths flourished on the banks of Late Otero. When the ice sheet receded from North America, however, the lake dried up. The megafauna went extinct, and the Paleoindian groups who’d hunted them left the basin for fairer climes. Vicious winds scraped the dry bed Lake Otero, and the entire valley was a swirling, furious storm of gypsum dust for about 3,000 years. No one hung out there during that time, for obvious reasons. Finally, about 4,000 years ago, the winds calmed and the gypsum settled into dunes. The archaic humans were like, “Oh, this seems like a cool place. I like this tasty ricegrass that grows on the edges of the dunes. Let’s chill here.” The rest is history.

My hike in White Sands ended, half by design, at sunset. I found myself on a high dune near, but not too near, the end of the trail, where families and drunkards had gathered with the same idea. Throughout the hike it had looked like the sky might not cooperate; the sun was mired in a bank of thick cloud just above the horizon. Well, we would see. I pulled on a jacket.

Nearby stood a lone photographer, a thick-calved white-haired man who was adjusting a tripod. I flopped down in the sand to watch, facing the mountains to the west. The sun began to color the sky in promising hues of orange. The clouds shifted and half dissipated. Then it came, like a gift: a magnificent sunset over the dunes.

“Look at that!” cried the man with the camera.

It was clear to me that he was seeking my attention. I inwardly rolled my eyes, ignoring him. The sky grew more and more exquisite.

“My god, would you look at that!” he whistled. “My god!”

It was futile. Might as well chat.

“Yep,” I said with a friendly smile. “It is amazing.”

The man was standing on my side of dune in an instant. He was Jerry Soper from Phoenix. He was retired but had a small business taking photographs of the outdoors.

“I’ve got a sole proprietorship,” he informed me. “My god, that’s a million dollar shot! You can’t buy a shot like that.”

Wasn’t that, I silently wondered, precisely a photographer’s goal: to sell a shot like that?

Jerry Soper was as warm as he was lonely. He told me about some places in Arizona I should check out, including Antelope Canyon, wherein I should seek out a particular tour group and a particular tour guide, Buddy.

“Buddy’ll do right by you. He’s the best. Tell them Jerry sent you. My god, would you look at that? Money just can’t buy that kind of sunset. Look at that pink!”

As it grew dark and the lip of the sky faded from neon to dusky pink, my new friend moved on. I didn’t see a headlamp around his neck, nor would I have trusted those ample but untoned calves to carry him sturdily over the darkening dunes.

“Look me up on Facebook,” he called. “And I’ll send you some photos!”

At last I was—again—alone. I turned around. The full moon had begun to rise in the east, a perfect orb. In the distance, people howled like wolves. Tears filled my eyes. It was so beautiful. I was alive and not murdered. The world was safe and the moon was full, bathing the sand in silvery light.

“Aah-oooooooooooooooh!” someone howled into the light.

Jerry was right: money couldn’t buy this kind of beauty. And I had come, as I always went outside, in search of beauty. Sometimes what you’re looking for is only five sandy miles—and one flush of terror, and one extinct giant sloth—away.

DETAILS

Location: White Sands National Monument, south-central New Mexico, 52 miles from Las Cruces

How to get there: Driving is best, though you can also fly into El Paso, TX (85 mi. away) and rent a car from there. There’s no public transportation option at this point.

Costs: $5 for adults, free with a parks pass

Permits: Only necessary for camping ($3/person/night) – but good luck scoring one of those spots!

When to go: Anytime of year, though weather and wind can be unpredictable. The monument closes at dusk (i.e., 6pm in winter), so if you want to sit on the dunes for the moonrise, go between May and September.

Bring: Plenty of water. Sun hat, sunscreen, sunglasses. Salty snacks. A huge camera with a tripod to catch that million dollar sunset.