49 Fun Facts About White Sands National Park

White Sands National Park is in which U.S. state?

New Mexico: the dunes fill part of the Tularosa Basin, a desert bowl whose outlet to the sea was blocked long ago, so the mineral washed down from the mountains stayed put instead of draining away.

The dunes of White Sands National Park are made of which mineral, rather than ordinary quartz sand?

Gypsum dissolves in water, so rain and snowmelt carried it down from the mountains in solution. Trapped in the basin, it crystallised as the lakes dried, and the wind ground the crystals into sand.

White Sands National Park lies in which desert, also home to Big Bend National Park?

Chihuahuan Desert: a high desert, and no gentle place. The park has recorded both 111 degrees Fahrenheit in summer and a winter night of minus 25.

In which direction are the dunes of White Sands slowly marching, driven by the prevailing wind?

Northeast: winds from the southwest drive them on, fastest at the bare upwind edge, while the plant-covered dunes on the far side barely move at all.

In 1982, which space shuttle made the programme's only landing at White Sands?

Columbia came down on a desert runway beside the dunes because its planned landing site in California was flooded. White dust from the strip kept turning up inside the orbiter for the rest of its career.

The missile range that completely surrounds White Sands National Park is run by which military branch?

The Army runs White Sands Missile Range, and the park lives by its timetable: when a test is on, the only road into the dunes can be shut for up to three hours.

Which president, in his final weeks in office in January 1933, made White Sands a national monument?

Herbert Hoover signed the proclamation under the Antiquities Act six weeks before leaving office. Local boosters had wanted a full national park but were advised a monument would be far easier to get.

White Sands became a national park in 2019 through a provision tucked inside what kind of bill?

A defence bill: the change rode inside the annual National Defense Authorization Act, which also swapped land between the park and the missile range that surrounds it.

Footprints at White Sands, dated by researchers to over 21,000 years ago, would overturn the accepted date of what?

People reaching the Americas: the accepted date had been 13,000 to 16,000 years ago. Critics argued the seeds used for dating could read too old, but 2023 tests on pollen and quartz grains gave the same answer.

Which Ice Age lake once covered much of the Tularosa Basin, leaving the flats that feed White Sands' dunes?

Lake Otero dried up as the Ice Age ended, and its bed became the Alkali Flat: the crystal-crusted plain that the wind has been grinding into dunes ever since.

Which dry lakebed in White Sands' southwest corner still floods now and then, leaving fresh crystals as it dries?

Lake Lucero is often called the birthplace of the dunes, because the crystals that form as it dries are what the wind grinds into sand. Rangers lead a monthly hike down to it in the cooler months.

Before the wind grinds it into White Sands' dunes, the mineral forms which crystals on the lakebed?

Selenite crystals can grow as long as a forearm on the Alkali Flat; wind and water then break them into ever smaller pieces until the grains are fine enough to blow away as sand.

Most of the 45 or so species found only at White Sands belong to which group of animals?

Moths: about 40 species live nowhere else, and not one of them was known to science before 2007. Like the park's pale lizards and mice, most of them are white.

Why have several of White Sands' lizards, mice and insects evolved pale colouring?

To hide from predators: darker animals stood out on the white dunes and were picked off first, so in about 7,000 years their descendants have turned far paler than relatives living a few miles away.

The only fish found in White Sands National Park, barely two inches long, is what kind of fish?

A pupfish: the White Sands pupfish lives nowhere else on Earth, a survivor of the basin's vanished Ice Age lake that copes with spring water ranging from fresh to saltier than the sea.

Which ant found at White Sands is believed to have the most toxic venom of any insect?

Maricopa harvester ant venom tested about 20 times as toxic as a honeybee's in mice, yet the horned lizards that eat these ants shrug off doses more than a thousand times larger.

Which White Sands rodent has a tail longer than its head and body together?

Merriam's kangaroo rat hops on long hind legs and needs that tail for balance, swinging it like a rudder to change direction suddenly when a hunter closes in.

Which bat, the most commonly seen at White Sands, finds most of its prey by walking on the ground?

Pallid bat: its outsized ears pick up the footsteps of scorpions, centipedes and crickets, and in summer it roosts under the eaves of the visitor centre.

Which African antelope, released nearby for hunting, led White Sands to build a 67-mile boundary fence?

Oryx bred from Kalahari stock were set loose from 1969 for sport hunting; with no natural check on their numbers, fewer than a hundred became thousands, and the park fenced itself off in 1996.

Which Ice Age animals left fossil trackways at White Sands alongside human footprints?

Mammoths, ground sloths and camels all crossed the muddy lakeshore, and one trail appears to show people stalking a sloth, their footprints pressed inside its own.

In 1880, Victorio's Apache warriors fought which famous cavalrymen at Hembrillo Basin, beside today's White Sands?

The Buffalo Soldiers of the 9th Cavalry fought one of the largest battles of Victorio's war there. Archaeologists have since plotted more than 800 spent cartridges from the fight and traced them to 147 rifles and 39 pistols.

In 1854 an El Paso merchant's armed posse fought Rio Grande villagers over which Tularosa Basin resource?

Salt pans: James Magoffin claimed the deposits and wanted payment for the salt, so when villagers set out to gather it without paying, he went after them with an armed posse.

What lies only a few feet beneath the dry surface of White Sands, helping to hold the dunes in place?

Groundwater: rain and snowmelt from the mountains collect in the basin with nowhere to go, so the sand is damp just below the surface. Dry it out, and the wind could carry the dunes away.

Which figure of the Teapot Dome scandal had earlier pushed for an 'All-Year National Park' taking in part of White Sands?

Albert B. Fall owned a ranch on the basin's edge. The Park Service's own director panned his plan's 'disjointed boundaries' and 'lack of spectacular scenery', and the bill failed after park and Indian-rights groups campaigned against it.

The mineral in White Sands' dunes was first laid down, over 250 million years ago, on the floor of what?

A shallow sea, rising and falling while the continents were joined as Pangaea. Later upheavals lifted its bed into the mountains around the basin, and rain has been washing the mineral back down ever since.

Which New Deal agency is credited with building White Sands' adobe visitor centre in the 1930s?

Works Progress Administration crews built it of sun-dried mud brick between 1936 and 1938, which is why it needs constant care: once the stucco skin cracks, wind and rain soon eat the adobe beneath.

Prehistoric campfires in White Sands' dunes survive as hard mounds because the heat turned the sand into what?

Plaster: at about 300 degrees Fahrenheit the dunes' mineral becomes plaster of Paris, which set hard with the next damp spell and cemented each hearth in place for thousands of years.

Tracks of which extinct Ice Age animal were found at White Sands beside seeds over 18,000 years old?

Dire wolf: heavier than a gray wolf and with a stronger bite, it probably hunted in packs, which let it bring down prey far bigger than itself.

Which 2007 blockbuster shot some of its desert scenes among the dunes of White Sands?

Transformers filmed among the dunes while Holloman Air Force Base, right next door, stood in for the film's American base in Qatar.

Which Clint Eastwood western shot scenes on the dunes of White Sands?

Hang 'Em High is set in Oklahoma Territory, but the crew never went near it: they filmed around Las Cruces in the summer of 1967 and used the white dunes for extra scenes.

Which popular activity draws visitors to the dunes of White Sands all year round?

Sledding takes some help here: sand is not slippery the way snow is, so riders wax plastic snow saucers, rented or bought at the park gift shop, to pick up any speed.

White Sands' spadefoots are named for a hard 'spade' on each hind foot, which they use to do what?

Burrow into the ground, where they sit out the dry months safe from water loss and predators. And though people have long called them spadefoot toads, they are really frogs.

The roadrunner, a year-round resident of White Sands, belongs to which family of birds?

Cuckoos: the roadrunner is a cuckoo built for running that would sooner sprint than fly, chasing down lizards, snakes and rodents on foot.

One fossil trackway at White Sands follows a single walker for about a mile: what was that person carrying?

A small child: the prints broaden and slip where the walker, a woman or a teenage boy, shifted the weight, and a toddler's footprints appear beside them wherever the child was set down.

What drove White Sands to bring in an alcohol ban in the 1990s?

Student spring-break parties had turned the dunes into what one ranger called 'an inexpensive Daytona Beach'; when the chief ranger checked a decade of citations, 85 percent involved alcohol.

Which historic test took place north of White Sands on July 16, 1945?

The first atomic bomb detonation, code-named Trinity, happened about 60 miles north of the dunes. Its heat fused the desert sand at ground zero into a green glass that was later named trinitite.

A camera aboard a V-2 rocket launched from White Sands took the first-ever what?

Photograph of Earth from space: by order, every captured rocket fired here had to carry a scientific payload, so others took up corn seeds, fruit flies and, later, monkeys.

Barchan dunes, found in the heart of White Sands, have what distinctive shape?

A crescent: wind drives sand up the gentle back slope and over the crest, while the dune's two thin horns run on ahead, pointing the way the whole dune is travelling.

Which town, about 15 miles from the visitor centre, is the main gateway to White Sands?

Alamogordo has the nearest fuel and rental cars; the other gateway, Las Cruces, is an hour's drive the opposite way, and no public transport reaches the park at all.

Which is the wettest month of the year at White Sands?

August: the desert monsoon runs from early July into late September and brings most of the year's rain, usually as thunderstorms late in the afternoon.

In 2008 the United States placed White Sands on its tentative list for which international status?

World Heritage Site: the case is that these dunes are the world's largest and best-protected deposit of their kind, because most other big ones have been heavily mined.

Which senator introduced the 2018 bill to make White Sands a national park?

Martin Heinrich's bill had the backing of the Mescalero Apache tribe and both nearby cities, but not of the park's own county commission, which wrote to him calling the change unnecessary.

Which people farmed the basin around White Sands and lived in permanent houses there for over a thousand years?

Jornada Mogollon is a name archaeologists gave them. In the end they moved away, leaving behind slumped mud walls and scatters of broken pottery.

At White Sands, the hardened column of sand left around a shrub's roots when its dune moves on is called what?

A pedestal forms because moisture carried by the roots seeps into the sand around them, which sets hard. When the dune blows onward, the shrub is left standing on its own plinth.

Which White Sands plant's leaf fibres did Native Americans twist into rope, sandals and coarse cloth?

Soaptree yucca roots were also boiled for soap, and it is the one plant here that outgrows a dune: its stem keeps lengthening to stay above the rising sand, then topples when the dune moves on.

Which bird at White Sands has been seen picking insects off the radiator grilles of parked cars?

Cactus wren: the largest wren in the United States nests among cactus spines for protection, and has learned that a car fresh off the highway arrives with a meal stuck to the front.

Which fox, weighing only about five pounds, hunts White Sands' dunes after dark?

Kit fox: its big ears shed body heat as well as pick up the rustle of prey, and tufts of fur between its toes give it grip on the loose sand.

David Bowie filmed scenes at White Sands for which of his films?

The Man Who Fell to Earth cast him as a visitor sent to fetch water for a planet dying of drought, so a desert shoot made sense: most of the film was made on location across the state.

The little white whiptail, a pale lizard of the White Sands dunes, escapes predators how?

Detaching its tail buys it time to bolt: many birds and mammals hunt it. Biologists still debate whether this pale lizard is a species of its own or a subspecies of the striped whiptail.