What’s White? Beach. Snow. Can’t be, we’re in the desert!
You wouldn’t believe me if I told ya, but I’m gonna tell ya anyway. We were cruising across southern New Mexico on Hwy 70 headed to Texas the other day, when all of a sudden we see this stuff…I said “it’s snow”, Mama said “no it ain’t cold enough to be snow”. I just thought they got a little light dusting awhile back and it’s just melted off the little shrubs sticking up out of the ground. She said, “It’s Panama City Beach sand.” I was like…sure, out here in New Mexico. To settle this dispute, we finally get to a border patrol or check station (a what-cha-ma-call-it) where the officer asks you if you’re an American citizen or not. I wanted to say “Si Senor” especially since this guy didn’t look American himself, but I refrained myself. He was a friendly and helpful fellow though. He told us it was the White Sands National Monument, a natural wonder to many people who pass through there. So see, I’m not the only wondering…perhaps a little mistaken, person out here, it just comes ‘naturally’. He, he, he.
We stopped at the little museum about it, but since they were closing, we couldn’t stay long. We found out it covers over 200 square miles of land in that area, and the sand is actually finely ground sediment of gypsum. Being in the vast White Sands Missle Range probably helps preserve it a little, what ya think? That is until they decide to make a target of the stuff…but surely they wouldn’t dare do such a thing…lol. It’s too pretty.
Continuing down the road a ways, it starts to snow…well, sleet at first… then light snow… then major blizzard conditions as we went up in elevation. Sure Mama, “ain’t cold enough to snow,” whatever. It was getting bad enough to shutdown, but uh…where? We’re out in the middle of nowhere, remember. Roads were covered with a nice layer of solid ice, we start slippin’ around a little. And when ya think it couldn’t get worse…goin’ up the hill the 4-wheeler in front of us slows down, so we slow down, so much so that when we tried to get goin’ again the gears got jammed and only grinded until we came to a complete stop in the middle of the road (I guess in the middle lane, couldn’t see the lines). Tires only spun and spun… we backed down the hill and slid far enough left so others could pass us on the right until we almost hit the curb trying to get traction. A nice female police officer pulls behind us with her lights on and gets out and helps direct traffic around us. She told us to sit tight until a tow truck came. We did not want to get towed and definatly didn’t want to pay for it, since technically we were rolling on ice. Opps! We started to pray that God would somehow intervene and get us unstuck and out of there safely. He immediately answered our prayers when a snow plow came to our rescue, sprayed dirt on our tires and cleared the snow packed road ahead of us for almost 20 miles it seemed until we came to a large casino/gas station/convienience store with truck parking. We pulled in there and shutdown till later the next morning when the sun finally came out to melt the snow. And we were “on the road again…with more great experiences to come…after these brief messages.” He, he, he.
