Otero County

During our Hueco Tanks stay, we planned to do one or two rest days depending on how we felt after bouldering a couple of days. We had several options with White Sands National Park leading the list.
Unfortunately we had one thing to do before driving there: getting a tire repair. The last two weeks we had already refilled the air in our left rear tire three times, but the pressure never lasted more than a few hundred miles. We called the Roadside Assistance of our rental company and they told us to go to a tire repair shop. In the USA many roads are unpaved and even the paved roads are often in a bad state, so tire repairs are a common thing to do and there are tons of repair shops everywhere. We drove into El Paso, got our tire repaired in roughly an hour and payed just 20 $ for it!

Two hours later we arrived at White Sands and it was insanely hot. We put on a lot of sunscreen and long clothes and went on 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 when 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 at the right place at the right time and captured one of them!
After just a few minutes of walking away from the parking area, we were completely surrounded by white dunes and couldn't see any car anymore, just a few people here and there on one of the other dunes. We inspected the footprints in the sand and realized that some people were walking barefoot. Up to that point we hadn't touched the sand and expected it to be really hot considering the permanent sun exposure, but it was actually cold! We took off our shoes and continued barefoot, which was really pleasant.
After 2 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 that 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 inspecting these footprints. They found hundreds of them, perfectly conserved. In 2021 a study dated the origin of these footprints back 21.000-23.000 years. The age was confirmed by a second study, just days before we went to the National Park. Before this study the common understanding was that humans inhabited the Americas after the last ice age, thus approximately 14.000 years ago. Some scientists had claimed to have found traces of human live that they thought to be older, but they couldn't substantiate 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 is now: how did they cross the ocean if not over the Bering Strait?Read more