White Sands National Park Driving Tour

• White Sands National Park Visitor Center

Step inside a Pueblo-Revival building built by Depression-era relief workers in the 1930s, and get your first look at the gypsum sand that makes this desert glow white instead of gold.

• Playa Trail & Dune Life Nature Trailhead

Walk the exact line where desert scrub meets gypsum dune — an ecotone busy with kangaroo rats, kit foxes, and the X-shaped tracks of a bird that outruns most of its enemies.

• Interdune Boardwalk

Step onto a raised wooden walkway built so you can wander into the dunes without sinking, and learn about Lake Otero, the vanished Ice Age lake that used to cover this entire valley.

• Roadrunner Picnic Area

Shade, tables, and a story that runs over twenty-three thousand years deep, from Jornada Mogollon farmers to the Mescalero Apache families who still call this basin home today.

• Alkali Flat

Grab a sled and race down a gypsum dune, then walk the trailhead where scientists found some of the oldest confirmed human footprints in North America, pressed into the mud beside mammoths and giant ground sloths.

• Yucca Picnic Area

A quiet stop shaded by desert plants, where non-native African oryx sometimes wander through—striking to look at, and not exactly supposed to be here.

• Sunset Stroll Meeting Point

Watch the entire dunefield shift through pink, orange, and gold as the sun drops, while kit foxes and kangaroo rats start their nightly rounds around you.

• Backcountry Camping Trailhead

The final stop, where Dunes Drive runs out of road and the dunes just keep going, with one last sledding hill for anyone who's still got the energy.