Day 32: City of Rocks State Park

Saturday, April 13, 1996
4384 miles
32° 35' 25" N / 107° 57' 59" W

As the sun rises, so does the wind.

The road takes us further South and right before Deming, Rebecca spots a flea market and turns into the parking lot. It's amazing to see all the stuff that people sell here - from goats to shoes to plastic toys to peanuts and so on - and the audience that buys the things.

In Deming we visit the Deming-Lunas-Mimbres Museum, which has tons of old stuff donated by the community and maintained by a very enthusiastic staff of volunteers. They are so enthusiastic that we don't dare just looking at the pots, but rather tour the whole place. Bell collections, button hook collections, doll collections and the like. It's unbelievable what people carry together when they decide to collect some random item.

Anyway, the Mimbres pottery collection is quite good. Unfortunately the artefacts were all found by amateurs, and so you can just look at the pieces out of their context, without learning where they come from, what they signify, etc.

Outside, the wind has reached stormy proportions and starts kicking up serious amounts of sand and dust. Arriving in Las Cruces we just miss another open air market in the downtown mall. So we cruise over to Mesilla and have lunch at the historic La Posta restaurant. The food is ok and afterwards we stroll around the historic plaza. Unfortunately this is one more useless plaza and so we're through pretty fast.

As we drive out of Las Cruces, the dust in the air is so bad that we don't even see the mountains that we cross. On the other side we enter the White Sands Missile Range. By now the atmosphere is like the nuclear Winter just started, which is perfectly appropriate for the place where they tested the first atomic bomb. It is however not so perfect for camping out in the sand dunes which was the original plan.

We drive the loop road into White Sands National Monument for a short distance, but after sand drifts start covering the road and the whole thing is looking more like a snow storm, we quickly scrap the idea.

So we cruise on and check out nearby Alamogordo. There isn't much to check out, but Rebecca doesn't give up and we head for the nearest state park to camp anyway. The park is set at the foot of the mountain range to the East of White Sands and somehow the wind doesn't blow so strong here. By the time the sun sets, it even dies down completely and we can watch the glowing fireball through the clouds of dust down in the basin.