I stopped at the old Mexican Canyon Railroad Trestle overlook, where in 1899 Charles Eddy built the “Cloud Climbing Railroad” into the Sacramento mountains to extract the timber resources, and also developed the tourist town of Cloudcroft.
The two-tiered wooden trestle is 323 feet long, and is pretty well preserved.
Historical sites are always worth a stop, although I doubt the Mountain Chickadees appreciated the trivia of human efforts.
I dropped down the mountain to Alamogordo and visited the White Sands National Monument, to spend some time walking some of the trails and driving the loop.
The sands are white because they are made of almost pure gypsum. The 275 square-mile gypsum dune field is the largest of its kind on Earth, with “… a depth of about 30 feet (9.1 m), dunes as tall as 60 feet (18 m), and about 4.1 billion metric tons of gypsum sand.”
The Park is completely surrounded by the White Sands Missile Range , infamous as the place that the U.S. in 1945 first detonated an Atomic Bomb! The Park is also adjacent to the Holloman Air Force Base, which provided intermittent but regular deafening fly-overs.
I started along the Dune Life Nature Trail, where the path is marked by what are, surely, temporary trail markers.
The plants and animals of White Sands must survive in a constantly changing landscape compared to other arid environments. A good example is the Soaptree yucca (Yucca elata), which adapts to the shifting dunes by its rapid growth.
Yuccas first take root in the inter-dunal soils. As the dune edges up and over the plant, pushed by the constant winds, it elongates its stem to keep its leaves above the sand for photosynthesis.
What may look like a 4-to-6-foot tall yucca growing on top of a dune is actually much longer, with a long stem connecting to its roots in the inter-dunal soil!
Other trees attempt to make their living among the dunes. I believe this is a Rio Grande cottonwood (Populus deltoides wislizeni).
Some fail at the task.
The Playa trail is a level half-mile walk with, yes, more interpretive signs.
One sign highlighted an old friend of mine from my days in southeastern Oregon, the four-wing saltbush.
The evaporation pan was white when I visited, but it may be brown, filled with water, or have growing selenite crystals.
One of the signs indicated that the tracks of mammoths, dire wolves, camels and American lions have been found here, but that the wind quickly erases all trace of the exposed remnants of the Pleistocene tracks.
All I could find were recent tracks of birds and beetles. These are even more ephemeral than those of the Mammoths.
There were pretty few birds to be seen today, but this Horned Lark wasn't too shy.
This strange-looking shrub intrigued me. Torrey’s Jointfir (Ephedra torreyana), is in the same genus as the epinephrine-producing Mormon tea (E. viridis) and distantly related to the conifer trees. Like the pines and firs, the plant produces “cones” rather than flowers. Nearly leafless, the jointfir photosynthesizes through its pale green, jointed stems.
I drove out the auto tour route, still amazed at the expanse of gypsum dunes, and was glad that I “ticked” a visit to this natural resource. The diversity of life and habitats in North America continues to astound me.
Leaving the sands, I drove west into Arizona, and had to stop to check out a large monument along State Highway 80, discovering it to be the Geronimo surrender monument, built in 1934.
On September 4, 1886, the Apache leaders Nachite and Geronimo and his band of followers surrendered to General Nelson Miles in the nearby Skeleton Canyon. After years on the run and guerrilla warfare with both United States and Mexican soldiers, the formidable shaman and war leader submitted to U.S. custody for the final time. Geronimo, bless his soul, never got to return to the reservation in his homelands, as the authorities (including Teddy Roosevelt) feared the animosities of the white Arizonans toward the last of the Apache warriors. He died of pneumonia in Oklahoma at the Fort Sill hospital in 1909, as a prisoner of war, regretting his decision to surrender. Geronimo is buried at the Fort Sill Indian Agency Cemetery, among the graves of relatives and other Apache prisoners of war.
I stopped for the night at Sierra Vista where I checked into the Magnuson Hotel, which is a bit older and spartan, but clean and had a comfortable bed. The gentleman checking me in suggested that I try the German Café on Fry Boulevard. It was only a few blocks away, so I checked it out & I’m glad I did, because they served a wonderful schnitzel for supper. And, my waitress had the prettiest smile.
Mexican Canyon Trestle overlook eBird checklist is Here
White Sands National Park eBird checklist is Here
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