By Robert Samuelsen
Nestled in the Tularosa valley in central New Mexico is the largest gypsum dunefield in the world! White Sands National Park includes 275 square miles of gypsum granules piled up in wind-blown dunes. While gypsum is plentiful, gypsum fields like White Sands are rare. To imagine bright white gypsum deposits 30 feet thick and up to 60 feet tall covering a large area in New Mexico is a stunning sight.
Gypsum is a hydrated calcium sulfate and a dehydrated salt with many industrial uses. The most common usage is in drywall and plaster products, but it is also used as a fertilizer, food additive, pharmaceuticals, and chalk. As a mineral, it can be both mined and commercially produced.
Naturally occurring in the nearby Sacramento mountains, the mineral is dissolved by rain into the watershed and distilled in landlocked shallow “dry” lakebeds.
The leftover gypsum crystals are carried by the wind breaking into progressively smaller pieces until they are the same size as sand and piled high in the dune making process. To call the crystals sand is a little bit of a misnomer. At a distance, it looks like sand but up close, it appears to be more like snow. I was able to make a snowball, the unpaved road was nothing more than packed gypsum, and its texture was not smooth like sand. It also holds water proven by the fact that I was able to dig a hole and find water in less than 6 inches even in the heat of the late desert summer.
Recently, archaeologists uncovered amazing human footprints dating back 23,000 years, centuries before the Pleistocene (ice age) period and well before the receding glaciers. This discovery refutes the notion by human migration theorists that people migrated to the Americas via the Bering land bridge. Early Americans were already here! At one point, a mile’s worth of tracks show a loving mother carrying and later walking beside her young child putting a beautiful touch of humanity into the archeological record.
Also found in the gypsum sediment are tracks from a mammoth, sloth, saber-tooth tiger, dire wolf, and other ice age animals.
Walking up and down the dunes was more like walking on cinder than sand yet many visitors had sleds and were sliding down the steep hills like it was Christmas time. After climbing one of the taller dunes, all I could see were white dunes in all directions – east, west, north, and south. It was an impressive sight to see the expanse of this moving mineral deposit. It was other-worldly like I had found myself on another planet. If little green men had popped out from behind a hill, I might have felt like the extraterrestrial. Instead. I felt like a jedi knight from the planet Corellia. The Force was that strong in this magical place.
Rob Samuelsen is an executive and adventurer supported by his long-suffering but supportive wife!
