White Sands and Bosque del
Apache - New Mexico Photo Tour
This trip was leaded by Russell Burden of Highlands
Ranch, Colorado. The group
gathered in the morning on December at Albuquerque and headed south, first to Alamogordo to take
landscape picture at near-by White Sand and made Super 8 motel the home base
for the first four days, then headed back north to Socorro and again, using
Super 8 as home base for bird photography at Bosque for the rest of the week.
White Sands
West of Alamogordo, a
vast area of desert and mountain ranges 100 by 40 miles in extent is closed to public
access and used by the military for various kinds of weapons testing; this
includes the Trinity Site where the first atomic bomb was detonated, in
July 1945. Determined tourists may visit on 2 days each year, the first
Saturdays of April and October, when accompanied tours are provided. The only
other feature of interest in this otherwise desolate and unwelcoming land is 60
miles south in the flat Tularosa Basin - here, for thousands of years the
prevailing westerly winds have deposited gypsum powder - formerly eroded from
the nearby San Andres Mountains, washed down by rainwater and deposited
in the seasonal Lake Lucero, a few miles southwest - creating a huge area of
white dunes covering 275 square miles. About half of the sands are within the
boundaries of the White Sands National Monument, one
of the most unusual and magical places in the Southwest. The national mnument is entirely surrounded by the White Sands Missile
Range; just east is the Holloman Air Force Base, and a few miles
north is one of the space shuttle landing sites. The space theme is reflected
in the nearby town of Alamogordo,
where there is the International Space Hall of Fame and Space Theater. The
dunes extend north into the missile range.
Bosque del Apache
Bosque del Apache is Spanish for "woods of the
Apache," and is rooted in the time when the Spanish observed Apaches
routinely camped in the riverside forest. Since then the name has come to mean
one of the most spectacular national wildlife refuges in North
America. Here, tens of
thousands of birds--including
sandhill cranes, Arctic geese, and many kinds of
ducks--gather each autumn and stay through the winter. Feeding snow geese erupt
in explosions of wings when frightened by a stalking coyote,
and at dusk, flight after flight of geese and cranes return to roost in the
marshes.
Want to see some white sand and birds - click here