White Sands National Monument is another of those places that every New Mexican should come at least once. Its the only place in the world like it. The only gypsum sand dunes anywhere, an ever changing landscape with some very unique wildlife that have adapted to it. Its been used as a backdrop for numerous movies, most recently as Iraq in the Transformers movies and as a different planet in the upcoming Stargate Universe show.

The place is highly photogenic with spectacular sunsets and sunrises and amazing light and shadow effects in the mornings and evenings. White Sands is one of those must haves in your portfolio of any South West photographer, unfortunately we arrived at noon so I had to work a lot harder for my shots. I had to go a few notches lower on my exposure and my ISO sensitivity to not overexpose shooting white on a white background. I think I still got some good ones, what do you think?

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We are thankful for our campground neighbors at Dog Canyon Campground for giving us the tip to check out the water falls on the way out. Sitting Bull Falls was spectacular, one of the highlights of our trip. If you are ever out on this side of the Guadalupe Mountains or spending some time in Carlsbad its not to be missed.

The way to the falls is a side branch off Highway 137 is just a narrow 9 mile long chip ‘n seal path with no painted road markings that runs down the bottom of some sheer rock canyons. We saw dozens of gigantic turkey vultures flying in and out of the caves along the cliff walls, I’ve never seen where they nested before. The road crosses back and forth over the dry creek bed at the bottom with no bridges over most so they’d probably get flooded quickly in the smallest rainstorm.

Its also open range for the most part. We passed by a steer grazing and the bike startled him. He jumped up and shook his head and stamped his front hooves and looked he was about to charge us. All I could see was sharp pointy horns and briefly think, “Uh-Oh, here we are on a bright red bike passing by. I sure hope they are right and bulls are really colorblind.” Luckily he only snorted and watched us cruise by.

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We totally blew past Highway 137 without seeing it the first time on our way to Dog Canyon Campground in the Guadalupe Mountains National Park. Its around 55 miles to the campground and theres no gas whatsoever so regardless I would have needed to have gone the extra 14 miles past the turn to Carlsbad to fill up and backtrack. However, I was still trying to keep an eye for it so I’d know where to turn. It ended up being across from Brantley Dam on the other side of the highway with nothing else but desert scrub land for miles and miles. I guess we were to distracted by the only thing of interest in ages and missed our turn.

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Three day weekend! You know what that means … Road Trip!

I know I’m still working on finishing up the posts from our epic trip back in July, and now I have another one to work on. We’ve got another trip this weekend back to Colorado and then another the weekend after that for the Ruidoso Rally. Just been too busy traveling to keep up with posting what all I’ve been doing heh. Dont worry, I’ll catch up.

We headed down to camp out in the Guadalupe Mountains and check out Carlsbad Caverns. On the return trip hopefully we can fit in White Sands and the tunnels on the way down from Cloudcroft too. We had intended on doing this trip earlier in the year as a last practice shakedown run before our epic July trip, but plans got put on hold with the bike down for a few months following the Close Encounter of the SUV kind.

Researching the Guadalupe Mountains for campgrounds I found Dog Canyon was pretty remote and isolated. Hopefully less crowded with tourists. I was a bit concerned that they didnt take reservations. With us traveling 400 miles first to get there on a holiday weekend and the few campsites they had being first come first serve only we might not get one.

So not a whole lot of pictures along the way, not that theres much to see. There are a lot of cool abandoned buildings in Vaughn and Encino that would make good photographic subjects sometime. There was even an abandoned garage with a 40′s era sedan still inside with the hood up covered with decades of dust, way cool. I’ll have to stop next time through.

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