Aguirre Springs and White Sands
This blog post is out of order - until I figure out how to change the order of the posts cast your mind back to our pre-Grand Canyon days!
We had long planned to spend Amy’s birthday in Zion National Park at their lodge. It would have meant my first national park was Amy’s favourite and we’d hopefully enjoy some gorgeous wintery hikes with the warm comfort of a hotel room waiting for us at the end of the day. Sadly it wasn’t meant to be! We made it as far as a small town called Gallup before we were turfed off the highway as the road out of New Mexico was closed due to a freak snowstorm (actually several freak snow storms pummelling the country this year.
At this elevation it didn’t look bad but the visibility was awful and police had shut the highway in the direction we wanted to go
We grabbed a room in a hotel in Gallup - and then grabbed another room after we realised (to the total surprise of hotel staff) that you could easily unlock our door with a credit card. Despite a general sense of unease (Gallup has one of the highest crime rates of the US) we actually had a pretty nice time. We both took two showers and did a load of laundry so we’d have clean sheets when we were back on the road. Our fellow guests were an interesting bunch of people - mostly travellers who’d got stuck including a guy hauling all his stuff on a motorbike and a massively amped up man who cornered me for a conversation about our plans. I’m sure he was fine but after a slightly creepy experience in a Cracker Barrel restaurant where a man overheard us talking about our plans and repeatedly told us to watch ourselves I was reluctant to engage.
I won’t lie - it was a bit depressing to postpone our Zion trip and head back to Albuqurque the next day without any plans for Amy’s birthday. Our car was covered in snow and that amped up man was also outside brushing his car off with a broom - very smart and way more effective than our ice scraper. Amy asked if we could borrow it and he was delighted to spend the time it took to clean the car off chatting about our respective travels. Amongst the million miles an hour adrenaline he told us we should check out some BLM land North of a town called Las Cruces. BLM here means “Bureau of Land Management” and is a conservation designation covering about 1/8th of the US.
I had a quick look and found a promising looking campsite called Aguirre Spring which cost $7 a night, first come first served and had great reviews promising sweeping mountain vistas (along with pit toilets and no running water). I’m not sure if this was the place he was talking about but it didn’t disappoint. There are 55 sites to choose from and they each have a covered picnic table and a grill. I don’t know about you but I love choosing a site to camp. Our first night we quickly settled on site 18 which was the highest up with gorgeous views but with the drawback of a caravan in the site opposite with three yappy dogs.
We both had an awful night’s sleep. Likely a combination of the altitude coupled with the van being on a slant meaning I was rolling into Amy all night - sorry babe. The next morning though we had a long breakfast and went for an out and back hike up to a mountain pass. It was a nice hike with the highlight being the huge ball cacti - they must be so old!
As it’s BLM land it’s multi use which means you can wild camp there and we spotted a potential site to spend a night in the tent. I’d just got a new backpacking bag that I wanted to test out; Amy had a new sleep system to try and we wanted to have a practice run with all our gear before attempting the Grand Canyon - although given the terrible weather I’m not totally sure we’ll make it on time to do the trip. Very sad especially as we raced across the country to make sure we’d get to the Canyon with plenty of time to spare.
The next morning, Amy’s 37th birthday, we moved to a different spot at the campsite which was a little more secluded, spoke to a lovely couple in a big van who gave us some fresh berries and an avocado and then headed out to White Sands National Park to explore the dunes.
Birthday breakfast on a chilly desert morning
It’s one of the newer national parks and our expectations were a little low, especially as we were both still feeling the altitude - it was messing with our sleep quality and making us pee constantly, which is apparently your bodies way of making room for more red blood cells. On arrival at White Sands we refused to pay over $20 for a plastic sand dune sledge - it felt like such a rip off for a piece of plastic and we didn’t have space for one anway. Luckily Amy’s eagle eyes spotted an abandoned sledge (a proper sledge with brakes - not even the usual plastic disc) in the dunes on our drive up and we quickly grabbed it and left it under the car while we went for what was supposed to be a 5 mile hike across the dunes.
The hiking was easier barefoot it was and lovely to feel the cool gypsum sand underfoot. After about a mile we both felt queasy and called the hike which instantly made us feel better. Better enough to try rolling down the dunes which was a lot of fun and got us psyched to try out the sledge.
We picked a quiet, steep dune and played around with the sledge for a while. Once you’ve gone over the same track you can really pick up some speed! Just as we were getting exhausted - a big group of college age kids came bounding over with a few sledges to start having fun. They were delighted to take our desert treasure sledge off our hands and promised to pass it on to another group when they were done. On our walk back to the car and around the visitor centre quite a few people tried to give us their sledges so my pro tip would be to not spend that $20 on a new one - you really don’t need to! Our final White Sands excursion was the nature trail which was a bit of a hidden gem - really peaceful and lots of interesting trees, landscapes and animal tracks to look at.
The next day at Aguirre Springs we did the second hike from the campsite and it was such a gem! It looked like a mini Yosemite - complete with a small half-dome type mountain and the variety of trees was incredible. It was also warm which made a really nice change.
After the hike though - changes were afoot. We could hear the wind booming through the mountains and see dust blowing off the desert far below us. We weighted all our things down with big rocks and settled down for lunch and a chat with my family. Halfway through the call though an enormous gust of wind came through the campsite. It lifted the rocks and took both our sleeping bags high into the air, tipped over our solar panels and tumbled them over the gravel. Everything else that wasn’t tied down also went flying and it was a mad scramble to decide what to save first. We threw the solar panels in the car, worried about the damage from the stones, and then chased after our sleeping bags.
Ominous dust storm in the desert below - note the change in visibility from the breakfast picture a few up!
Amy caught hers but mine was stuck high up in a tree and the rocks we were throwing at it weren’t doing anything to release it. We then remembered the tent which wasn’t staked down and Amy rushed over to take it down and grab the poles to use to reach my sleeping bag. Luckily it hadn’t been blown away! Once we’d retrieved all our stuff (there was plenty of other thing scattered around) we retreated to the car and felt it rocking as more gusts of wind moved in. It had also got really cold. We made the decision to try and leave and get to Tucson before making a dash for the Grand Canyon in the hopes of beating the snow through Flagstaff.
