Carlsbad to Alamogordo

Date: May 22
Day: 8
RV Miles: 1,448
Location: Alamogordo, NM
Elevation: 4,214

Broke camp and headed to Alamogordo, about 180 miles away. We could have taken a much shorter route through Cloudcroft. Cloudcroft is at an elevation of about 9,000 feet and the decent into Alamogordo is a steep winding 6% grade that they do not let trucks use. So rather than tempt fate and have the brakes go out, we took a longer and much safer route. Seems Larry is an experienced RV-mountain-navigator and bought a book that lists all of the steep hills in the Western United States. There is hope for Larry yet.

One of the major industries around Carlsbad, other than oil, is cattle. Ever since we got off the expressway near Amarillo, we have found the countryside dotted with cattle feedlots. These are usually huge operations (some taking up as much as a square mile) with grain silos for feed and huge piles of manure covered in plastic. It looks like after the manure has “aged” they sell it for fertilizer. Normally you can smell the feedlots long before you can see them. I generally ignore the smell, but Sasha puts her nose in overload.

Larry and I agree and do not consider feedlots particularly photogenic or the type of thing one would like to put in their photo album. Marsha, on the other hand wanted a picture of a feedlot. Why? Only Marsha knows, so I included a one third of a panorama of a feedlot North of Carlsbad that Larry took; This is just the South end of the feedlot; there are two more pictures north of this one that are just as long. Larry commented that his camera can record sound and it was too bad it couldn’t record smells to add some realism to the photograph.

On the drive to Alamogordo, the wind was blowing hard and as we were coming down the side of the mountains towards town, you could see the White Sands Dunes stretching for miles in a narrow strip running North-South. The winds had whipped up huge white clouds of sand that rose hundreds of feet in the air.

Anyway, we got settled into a campground in Alamogordo about 3PM . After I had sniffed out our campsite to make sure it was OK, Marsha suggested we pack dinner and head out to White Sands National Monument. Larry “rented” a snow disk to sled down the dunes. Here’s where Larry lost his atta-boy for mountain-navigation.

Remember the comment about the wind? Well, the wind was blowing across the top of, and down the side of the dune carrying with it a substantial amount of sand. Sorta like a natural sand blasting machine. So in order to get to the top of the dune, Larry had to climb up facing right into this sandstorm spitting sand out of his mouth every step of the way.

Being of superior intellect, I refused to climb the dune as did Marsha. She petulantly commented to Larry, “I don’t want sand everyplace sand isn’t supposed to be.”

Initially there was hope for Sasha since she didn’t want to climb the dune, but the exuberance of youth prevailed and she went up the dune with Larry. She’ll learn. Larry won’t.


Well, Larry and Sasha had a nice little sled ride back down the dune and that was that. What you can’t see in the picture is that by the time he got off the dune he was caked in sand, had sand in his hair, in his eyes, in his ears and every other place sand shouldn’t be. The first thing he did when he got back to camp was to go to the camp shower room and stand under the faucet for about 30 minutes.

The dune area is quite impressive, it looks very much like a world that has just experienced a huge blizzard – everything is white no matter where you look.