White Sands National Park (New Mexico)

While at Hueco Tanks, we planned to take a day or two off, depending on how we felt after a few days of bouldering. We had several options, with White Sands National Park at the top of the list.
Unfortunately, we had to do one thing before we could go there: get a tire fixed. We had pumped air into our left rear tire three times in the last two weeks, but the pressure never lasted more than a few hundred miles. We called our rental company's roadside assistance and they told us to go to a tire shop. In the USA many roads are unpaved and even the paved roads are often in bad shape, so tire repair is a common thing and there are tons of repair shops everywhere. We drove to El Paso, got our tire fixed in about an hour and paid only $20 for it!

Two hours later we got to White Sands and it was insanely hot. We put on lots of sunscreen and long clothes and took a backcountry hike into the white dunes. At the visitor center they sold small sleds, but they were quite expensive and we thought we wouldn't really need one, but as we left the visitor center a family just put 5 sleds next to the entrance for everyone to take. They were gone immediately, but we were in the right place at the right time and caught one of them!
After a few minutes of walking away from the parking lot, we were completely surrounded by white dunes and couldn't see any cars, just a few people here and there on one of the other dunes. We inspected the footprints in the sand and noticed that some people were barefoot. We hadn't touched the sand up to that point and expected it to be really hot considering the constant exposure to the sun, but it was actually cold! We took off our shoes and walked barefoot, which was really pleasant.
After two hours of hiking and sledding, we returned to the car and drove to the Sunset Ranger Tour, where we learned a lot about the vegetation and the people who lived in the area.
In 2018, one of the dunes moved, and one of the rangers noticed patterns in the ground that looked like human footprints. He informed others, and soon scientists were studying these footprints. They found hundreds of them, perfectly preserved. In 2021, a study dated the origin of these footprints to 21,000-23,000 years ago. The age was confirmed by a second study just days before we went to the national park. Prior to this study, the general consensus was that humans inhabited the Americas after the last ice age, about 14,000 years ago. Some scientists had claimed to have found traces of human life that they thought were older, but they couldn't back up those theories with real evidence. With these new studies, there seems to be some controversy and discussion in the scientific community, according to our tour guide. The big question now is: how did they cross the ocean if not through the Bering Strait?Baca selengkapnya