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White Sands National Park: One of the Best National Parks to Visit in the Southwest

If you're building a list of the best national parks to visit in the Southwest, White Sands National Park deserves a spot near the top.


Just outside Alamogordo, New Mexico, this park protects the largest gypsum dunefield on Earth, a blinding white sea of sand unlike anything else in the National Park System.


What makes White Sands one of the best national parks to visit isn't just the scenery. It's the layers of history hiding underneath it: an Ice Age lake, footprints older than the pyramids, and a living Apache culture that still calls this basin home.



TAKE A SELF-GUIDED TOUR OF WHITE SANDS:


The White Sands National Park Driving Tour tells this story and more as you drive Dunes Drive at your own pace.


Along the way you'll learn:

  • The vanished Ice Age lake buried under the dunes you're driving across

  • Why the oldest confirmed human footprints in North America were found here

  • How a picnic area named for a famously fast bird tells a much older story


Most drivers finish the route in two to three hours with stops.




THE LAKE HIDING UNDER THE DUNES:


Ten thousand years ago, none of this was sand. Lake Otero covered nearly sixteen hundred square miles of this valley, ringed with wetlands where mammoths and giant ground sloths came to drink. As the lake dried up, it left behind the gypsum that wind eventually ground into the dunes visitors sled down today.


THE OLDEST FOOTPRINTS IN NORTH AMERICA:


Scientists have found human footprints preserved in the old lakebed at White Sands, dated to roughly twenty-one to twenty-three thousand years ago. One set of tracks even shows a mammoth's path crossing a person's, frozen in the mud for millennia.


TWENTY-THREE THOUSAND YEARS OF HOME:


People have called this basin home for over twenty-three thousand years, from Jornada Mogollon farmers to Apache families who traveled these dunes on ancient salt trails. The Mescalero Apache Nation, based today in the nearby Sacramento Mountains, are direct descendants of that same community.



WHAT TO KNOW BEFORE YOU GO:


  • Entrance fee is $25 per vehicle, valid for seven days

  • Bring water and sun protection—shade is limited on the dunes

  • Speed limits drop once you're on the Loop Drive, where sledders and walkers share the road


PLAN YOUR TRIP:


Want the full breakdown—where to eat, where to stay, and how to plan a one or two-day visit around White Sands? Our White Sands travel guide covers all of it.


Check out our White Sands travel guide to plan your trip.

 
 
 

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