White Sands — Sandra Herber Photography

Back in the summer, I was chatting with my friend Frank about possible photo projects for each of us. He and I have known each other for over ten years (having met online on Flickr) and, despite only meeting in person once, we have developed a deep friendship. There are so many reasons to complain about social media, but it can be an amazing way to connect with people you’d never ordinarily meet, but with whom you share an interest (or obsession, when comes to photography). Frank is one of those connections that turned into a real friendship. We’d been talking for years about doing a photography trip together and we were tossing ideas around when he said, “I’d love to go to Death Valley to photograph the dunes”. I had been there, years ago, and had wonderful memories of that trip, but I didn’t fancy a revisit. “What about White Sands?” I said. He hadn’t heard of it, so we looked at some pictures online and decided, almost then and there, to do the trip.

White Sands National Park (originally designated a National Monument in 1933) is located in southern New Mexico, in the Tularosa Basin between the San Andres Mountains to the west and the Sacramento Mountains to the east. The park contains about 40% of a huge area of white sand dunes, while the other 60% is contained within the White Sands Missile Range and Holloman Air Force Base. The fact that the dunes are white (or cream or pink or purple, depending on the light) is a great attraction for photographers and it had been on my list of potential destinations for a while.

That first evening: clouds, gorgeous light, but we were definitely in the wrong place

The first day of the trip was a long one. It started off with a 2:30am wake up to make my early-morning flight to Atlanta, where I met up with Frank and where we caught our flight to El Paso. Even though White Sands is in New Mexico, the closest airport is just an hour and a half away in El Paso, Texas. By the time we got the bags, the rental car, drove up to Alamogordo (where we were staying), got some groceries, dumped our stuff at the Airbnb and got to the park, we only had about half an hour before sunset. The place was packed! We picked October because I can get away for a week when the students at my college are on Reading Week break, because it’s not the hottest time of the year and because it’s one of White Sands’ less-visited months (at least it was according to data over the last few years). Well, we were wrong on the last count. There were people everywhere, all over the dunes and footprints, new and old, were everywhere, too. I knew that this trip would be a great challenge photographically – the place is gorgeous but from all I have heard, it can be hard to get really good shots – and that first night confirmed that it certainly would be a challenge. The window of soft light in the morning and evening was relatively short and we were going to have to get out deep into the dune field to find untouched (or nearly untouched) dunes. Luckily, we were going to devote four full days to trying to get it right.

On our first morning, after about just 6 hours of sleep, and some food, I felt much more positive and excited. We headed out to the park for opening at 7am and drove in to some beautiful early morning light. The park opens at 7am and closes at 7pm at this time of the year, which makes it very difficult for a photographer to get soft morning and evening light. Frank and I applied for special permits for an early entry and for late stays for later in the week, but on that first morning we could only enter the park at the usual opening time of 7am and see the beautiful morning light out the car window as we were driving into the dunes.

That morning we did our first walk out into the dunes. We walked 4kms and it took us over 3 hours! That’s what happens when there’s so much beautiful landscape to take in and interesting things to shoot. There were lots of challenges – a new landscape, the light, the shapes, the compositions, the lenses (I rarely shoot with longer lenses, but here they really came in handy) – but part of my excitement for this trip was in the photographic challenges it would entail. As a photographer, it’s always great to challenge yourself with new landscapes!

For our evening shoot, we got to the turnout where we planned to leave the car about two hours before sunset. The plan was to make a beeline out into the dunes, following approximately the same path we’d taken in the morning, and (hopefully) be out among the larger and less trampled dunes for the lovely, soft evening light. This evening was the first one where we had permission to stay in the park an hour after it closed. This would allow us to shoot far out in the dune field until we lost the light, then hike back to the car, and do the 20-minute or so drive to the gate before our permit expired. It’s near impossible (or very rushed) to go anywhere deep in the dunes and make it back to the gate when the sun sets at 6:30 and the gate closes at 7pm. The problem, of course, would be finding our way back to the car in the semi-darkness after twilight (and then, after a little while, real darkness), but we used a great app to track our steps on all our hikes and that allowed us to find our way back to where we’d parked. It worked so well in the morning that Frank declared it a miracle that I’d navigated us right back to our parking spot. Another problem was that you can’t walk in a straight line anywhere in White Sands. In the daylight, it’s relatively easy to see ahead to where the steep and high dunes are and where you can snake around them, but that becomes much harder at night. By the time we lost the light at around 6:45pm, we were easily a 30-minute walk from the car. There was only one point, near the end, when the light was really low and we couldn’t see very well (but didn’t want to put on our headlamps for fear of losing our night vision completely) that we came up to the edge of a steep drop down a dune. Ok, we thought, let’s try left and see if we can find a more gentle slope down. We did. In the end we had to go further north than we wanted and ended up walking down the road to the turnout where our car was parked. Not quite the perfect navigating I’d done in the morning, but not too bad. Our first late night gave us confidence that we could navigate in the dark on future outings.

As we drove back towards the gate, we saw an oryx crossing the road. We could have been in Namibia, but no, we were still in New Mexico! Oryx were introduced to the area in the 70s for hunting purposes and with no natural predators, they have thrived in the White Sands Missile Test Site and in the park. At some point on our drive, we saw a ranger’s truck coming towards us. We weren’t late, but the rangers had told us they would start looking for us before the end of our permit time, just to make sure we weren’t lost out in the dunes. Ranger Aaron, who covered our permit the first night, turned around and followed us to the entrance and before we left, we had a nice chat with him. We asked what would have happened if we hadn’t shown up at our car by 8pm. He told us that the first thing he would have done would have been to conduct ‘a hasty’ for us – a quick search of the first three dunes near our parking spot. Luckily there was no need for that.

The day wasn’t over for us, yet, though! Frank has been, for years, doing a nighttime photo series of gas stations, so we photographed some gas stations in Alamogordo before heading back to our Airbnb.

The next day we were out the door by 6:30am again. It was a chilly start to the day - around 37F or 3C - so we had to keep moving to stay warm. We knew that we’d have warmer temperatures in the afternoons/evenings so neither of us had brought a jacket or gloves. We started out exploring the Backcountry Camping Trail (backcountry camping has, unfortunately, been closed since the pandemic, but the trail is still open), but didn’t really like what we saw, so we went to a new area. We got further west and south into the dune field than we had on any other outing and we paid for it with a long, nearly hour-long, walk out, but we saw some fantastic, pristine dunes in wonderful shapes, accentuated but beautiful morning light. A photographer’s delight!

As with our other days, after our morning shoot we’d stop in town for whatever we needed and then go back to our Airbnb to relax before heading back to the park around 4:30pm. That afternoon we tried a different area for our evening/sunset/blue hour shoot. We went to the end of Dunes Drive to the Alkalai Flats Trail Loop Trail and walked out from there. Though this is one of the most busy trails in the park, we had read that if we broke off from the trail and walked into the centre of loop, we might find larger and untrammeled dunes - which we did. We had secured four evening special permits and the light that we saw on those shoots was just gorgeous. Our strategy was to walk in for 30-45 minutes during the afternoon heat and harsher light knowing that around 5:50pm, the light would start to soften and we’d have that light until sunset at around 6:30. Then, after sunset, for about 15 minutes, we got the most gorgeous show of soft pastel colours and light. Those were the most magical times of the trip and we looked forward to them every evening.

That night was the first night we met Ranger Kyle and it turned out that he would be the ranger covering all the rest of the late stay permits. We made it our tradition to pack two Fairlife protein shakes in our cooler to drink after our hikes. These were always a treat and for those three nights, we also ended up having nice chats with Ranger Kyle - that became part of our tradition, too. That night we asked him what would have happened if we hadn’t applied for the permits and had ended up leaving the park after official closing. He told us that the tickets for violating the park hours start at $150 per person! We were sure glad to have our permits.

On the next morning we had a special permit to get into the park before opening, so wake up was especially early and we were in the car at 5:30am to get to the park by 6am. We were surprised, when we arrived, to see three cars already there, but the Ranger waved us in after she confirmed who we were and we headed to the area we’d decided to focus on for our morning shoot. Once we got there we realized what was happening: a movie crew was setting up for filming at sunrise. Frank went to talk to them and they were OK with us leaving our car in their area (a large, chained-off parking area reserved for film and video shoots) and we set off with the sky just beginning to lighten. It was another cold morning – around 45F/7C, so we got moving to warm up. As always, we wanted to get out into the dunes deep enough so that we could find some that hadn’t been walked on. Luckily we got out far enough in time for a magical twilight/blue hour. It’s hard to describe just how beautiful that time – the time just before sunrise and just after sunset – was for us. The dunes appear blue/purple and the sky has colours in a gradation from purple/navy to orange to yellow to light blue. Everything is bathed in soft light, and it looks otherworldly. Calling it ‘Blue Hour’ is really a misnomer as this gorgeous light lasts only about 15 minutes. This ‘time limit’ was in back of our minds: as we walked in we were looking for an interesting place to be (preferably with multiple compositions facing that light) for those twilight 15 minutes. There was some pressure in that and then when the light came there was a rush to get shots but I found myself on multiple occasions just stopping and gawping at the sky and the dunes, amazed and joyful to be in such a stunningly beautiful place. I had heard photographers say that there is something magical about the light in New Mexico and we certainly would agree with that!

After our trek back to the car, we checked out some options for that evening’s shoot and then headed back to Alamogordo for lunch and a lovely treat – frozen custard at Caliche’s - a place which had been recommended to me by a number of people.

Our last two evening shoots were the hottest we’d had. Temperatures were expected to top 85F/29C on the first evening. We had hoped for seasonal October high temperatures of around 78F/26C, but this was a bit hotter than we expected. The nice thing was that the worst heat we experienced was at the beginning of hike - as the time went on, the sun softened and the temps dropped. After another lovely shoot, we met up with Ranger Kyle for our escort out and this time he told us about the different issues that crop up at different times of the year - in the summer he often has to help people who walk the Alkalai Flats Trail without water (the park recommends you bring a gallon of water per person!) but he said we were now entering the time of year where they start worrying about people getting lost in the dunes and suffering hypothermia at night. It’s a tough landscape with temperatures at the extremes of cold and hot! We asked him about the ridges that we’d seen in the inter-dune areas and he explained to us that they are, essentially, the dunes’ footprints. As the dunes get shifted around by the wind the heaviest/most dense parts of the dunes leave this hard ridges in the inter-dune areas - a kind of record of the dune’s movement over time.

The next day was our last full day of shooting. We didn’t have an early entry permit so we arrived at 7am opening just as the sky lit up with beautiful colours. On the last morning the temperature was a lovely 57F/14C and we hiked for about 3 hours for our morning shoot. I had promised myself to try walking barefoot in the dunes and I did that this morning (there is photographic evidence, but I don’t want to show it and put people off their food with my un-pedicured toes). The dunes at White Sands are not actually sand – they are gypsum and gypsum reflects the sun rather than absorbing it so the dunes remain cool all day. By the time we’d finished our hike, the temps were in the low 80s (around 27C), we guessed, and it was magical to walk a ways in bare feet on the cool dunes.

After our morning shoot we came back to our Airbnb for lunch and a rest. We sat out on one of the balconies, ate our sandwiches overlooking Alamogordo and White Sands and wondered how this trip, that we had been planning for so long, had gone so quickly.

Milky Way and comet over the dunes on our last night.

After another hot hike into the dunes for our evening shoot, we were treated to the usual 15 minutes of gorgeous light after sunset. This last night, though, we had requested to stay and photograph the Milky Way (and the comet, which was still barely visible), so we made our way back towards our parking spot, but stopped in an area we had identified earlier for a Milky Way shot. It isn’t the best time of the year to shoot (the galactic core of the Milky Way is at the horizon when astronomical darkness arrives and drops below the horizon as the evening goes on), White Sands isn’t the darkest place (it has a Bortle rating of 3 or 4), and I sure was out of practice (not having done a Milky Way shot in years) but it was quite special to be out in the dunes on our own in real darkness. Happily we found our way back to our car (parked, with permission, in the Film Lot) with me checking the app for our tracks and Frank leading the way. We did so well that we actually came upon our own tracks that we had made going in earlier that evening. We drank our ‘milkshakes’ sitting on the lip of the back of the car with all the lights out, just staring up at the star-filled sky. At some point, Ranger Kyle walked out to where we’d parked and told us he was a little sorry that we had navigated our way out so well, as he was looking forward to potentially having to go into the dunes to find us. We had spent 3 evenings chatting to him, but all of them were in near-total darkness. Frank and I agreed that despite all the time we’d spent with him, we wouldn’t have even been able to pick him out of a lineup!

The next day we headed home, and that was the end of our trip. We had spent four full days in White Sands National Park, a surreal and gorgeous landscape. We had enjoyed the challenges of hiking out into the dunes, and finding interesting compositions to photograph, and the magical light at twilight (and the eerie glow after twilight) that mesmerized us. When we got home, Frank sent me this text after he started looking at his images: “These twilight shots are blowing me away. I’m thinking, I shot this? Sandra and I went to New Mexico, climbed miles of dunes, and found these locations at the exact right movement when the light created magic?” I agreed with him - we were so lucky to get to experience and photograph that gorgeous landscape and its special light.

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