 White on white. Barren yet surreal beauty. To even an astute observer, the place appears devoid of life. 250 million years ago, this land lay quietly at the bottom of an inland sea. Heat, pressure and time brought this bed of pure gypsum to the surface, where it subsequently collapsed, trapping sand in a vast basin. Today that sand blows continually into ever-changing, convoluted, white dunes. It’s a land of texture without color. Preserved as White Sands National Monument, this anomaly of a "desert within a desert" occupies the northern fringes of New Mexico’s Chihuahuan Desert. What life there is here must have been breathed into the place by the wind, for no evolutionary "plan" could have decided how to fill this niche. Even the lizards and the mice are white, their only protection from predation. If a plant can’t root quickly here, it’s blown away. Yet stark turns soft each evening, as nature paints a sunset light show on the sand, perhaps reminding us that beauty, too, comes in as many forms as nature.
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Visible Wind
Shifting Sands |
