White Sand

[I originally wrote this in October 2011, but never posted this series on the local geology. The pictures are still worth seeing.]

There are things you always say you’re going to do, and something always intervenes.

Every time I drive north towards Taos from Velarde I tell myself I really must pull over on the way back and look. Fallen lava boulders litter the right shoulder as you rise. By necessity, the turn offs are all on the other side. The road has too many blind spots to simply cross over to one.

But then, when you’re coming home, you’re, well, coming home. It’s a different mental state. There’s never time to pull over.

Well, I finally did it. When I was coming back from the Dixon area a few weeks ago, I pulled over in some of the places between Embudo and Velarde where the rift is narrow, the Rio Grande close to the road.

The look up towards Taos isn’t quite as dramatic as it was when you were driving north - but then it’s like the drive down La Bajada Hill - there are no turn offs when the rocks are the most menacing. The turn offs are only where there’s room, which, by definition, is not where it’s most exciting. Perspective is different from fifty feet across the road.

 

The river turns out to look like a river there, like any river anywhere in the country where water actually flows and doesn’t simply ripple around sand islands as it does in Española. Nice, unusual actually for New Mexico, but conventional still the same.

Then there’s the unexpected, the thing you didn’t know was there because you never stopped.

In this case, there was a patch of white sand near the river with Russian thistles and purple asters. You think, wait a minute, white sand? New Mexico?

 

The White Sands in the Tularosa Valley are gypsum dunes. This glittered in the sun. It had to be ground quartz, which of course is as much silica as sand. In fact ground pure quartz provided the material for Venetian glass makers.

Quartz has the greatest weather resistence of any of the rocks in the area. It’s often the last remaining eroded rock from the Sangre de Cristo. This "dune" looks suspiciously like how that sedimentary grey rock I saw earlier in the day beyond Dixon would look if everything soft disappeared and left only the quartz and shining mica. And it photographs the same way, too brown and out of focus, or all glare.