White gypsum dunes fading into blue dusk at White Sands, a lone figure on a distant crest and mountains on the horizon
Charles & Maggie Boyer / CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
New Mexico · Region

White Sands & the Sacramento Mountains

The gypsum dunes and the footprints found in them, the Mescalero Apache homeland, the Lincoln County War, and the cub rescued from the Capitan fire.

4 places to explore

White Sands is the largest gypsum dunefield on Earth, about 275 square miles of white sand blown out of the dry bed of an Ice Age lake in the Tularosa Basin. Footprints pressed into that old lakeshore and buried under it have been dated to between 21,000 and 23,000 years ago, some of the oldest evidence of people anywhere in the Americas, though the dates are still argued. At Three Rivers, Jornada Mogollon people carved more than 21,000 petroglyphs into a basalt ridge between about 900 and 1400.

The Sacramento Mountains rise straight out of the basin to the east, and the Mescalero Apache Reservation, set aside in 1873, takes in much of their timbered high country. It is the homeland of the Mescalero, and also of the Chiricahua and Lipan Apache bands who were brought here in the early twentieth century; the Chiricahua came in 1913 after twenty-seven years as prisoners of war. The tribe runs the ski area at Ski Apache and the resort at Inn of the Mountain Gods.

North of the mountains, Lincoln is the town where two merchant factions fought the Lincoln County War of 1878, and where Billy the Kid escaped from the courthouse jail in 1881, killing two deputies. In 1950 firefighters in the Capitan Mountains found a badly burned black bear cub clinging to a tree; he became Smokey Bear and is buried at Capitan.

What to See in White Sands & the Sacramento Mountains

4 places across the region, grouped by what they are.

Natural Areas

A rippled crest of white gypsum sand curving across the dunes at White Sands under a lightly clouded sky

White Sands National Park

Alamogordo

The largest gypsum dunefield on Earth, a national park since 2019, surrounded on all sides by military ground whose missile tests close its only road for hours at a time.

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Historic Sites

The long portal of the Tunstall Store beside US-380 in Lincoln, shaded by tall cottonwoods, in a black-and-white survey photograph

Lincoln Historic Site

Lincoln

One street of adobe in the Bonito valley kept much as it was in the 1870s, where the Lincoln County War was fought over who would supply Fort Stanton and the Mescalero agency.

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The entrance sign and visitor buildings of Smokey Bear Historical Park in Capitan, among pines under a clear sky

Smokey Bear Historical Park

Capitan

The small park in Capitan where the living Smokey Bear is buried, a cub found clinging to a burned tree in the Capitan Mountains in 1950, six years after the cartoon was invented.

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Towns & Gateways

Three Rivers Petroglyph Site

Tularosa

More than 21,000 petroglyphs on a basalt ridge above the Tularosa Basin, one of the few places in the Southwest set aside for its rock art alone, walked on a rough half-mile trail.

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Stories from White Sands & the Sacramento Mountains

Nature

The Lizards That Turned White

Three kinds of lizard that are brown or gray in the desert around White Sands have gone white on the gypsum dunes in a few thousand years, each by a different change to the same gene.

5 min read

White Sands & the Sacramento Mountains rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.

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