photography

Waypoint: White Sands National Park, Tularosa Basin, New Mexico, USA

“These images and words are a reflection, simply and wholly, of my respect for our public lands and the public science and occasional art I am, and we are, able to do there. Our ability to create and think are not trivial, and wild space and healthy ecosystems nourish such things. It is here that we will find our better selves, even as the misdeeds of a few threaten much that, until recently, provides for our common good. Keep going.“

A couple times over the past two years, I have had the good fortune to wander among the gypsum dunes of White Sands National Park in south-central New Mexico. My visits dovetail with geoarchaeological research in the Tularosa Basin, where we have been looking, with the help of and collaboration with specialists and volunteers at the National Park Service and friends and colleagues at Holloman Air Force Base, at the context of human and faunal trackways along the margins of pluvial Lake Otero. The footprints are fascinating and perplexing, and the various studies implemented at Lake Otero provide comparison to our approach to somewhat similar ichnofacies on Utah’s Old River Bed Delta, a landform of the Bonneville Basin that supported an expansive wetland between 12,600 and 8,800 years ago. By bookending daytime research excursions with walks in the expansive white dunes, I had time to consider the setting, past and present, and its broader implications at a slower pace and without contention. And, sometimes, the light is so good.

The white, gypsum sand that forms the dunes is a result of a long interplay between bedrock of the mountain ranges surrounding the Tularosa Basin, basinward erosion of fine-grained minerals derived from the parent rock, catalysts of groundwater chemistry, and climate change. In the Late Pleistocene, say, between about 22 and 18 thousand years ago, Lake Otero rose and fell – by day, by season, by decade, by millennium – as runoff battled evaporation and groundwater sought equilibrium in between. These perturbations produced an evaporite soup, at times deep and dilute, and at others shallow and practically viscous. The overlap of conditions from bedrock to basin hydrology are incomparable with almost all other paleolakes in the desert west.

With the warming and drying of the last 14,000 years, the hallmark of the Holocene, a prevailing southwesterly wind scours the exposed bed of crystalline gypsum – the relict product of the Pleistocene chemistry – that bounces and rolls to become sand-sized aggregates of dune-building material; finer particles get carried away to coat the hills in desert loess or circle the globe as aerosol clay. Earth tends toward recycling.

And so, the scoured lakebed becomes the gypsum dunes of White Sands, a process still happening today. The sand subdues and reflects the color of the sky, bending the hues along wind-sculpted crests and swales. Shadows are abrupt until blue hour erases all depth, molding the reflected glow to a calm iridescence; the changes are reversed for sunrise. Although I have visited in the early morning, park hours limit sunrise opportunities to a few minutes; it is sunset that brings productive wandering. That is until park rangers begin the pre-dark patrol, broadcasting the requirement that all wanderers return to their vehicles, leaving the dunes to their nightly rearrangement.

I hope you enjoy this small gallery of images from White Sands. Active dunes are always changing; the photos you capture are yours alone, the winds bring originality. Most visitors do not venture very far into the hills of sand, so it takes little effort to get beyond the occasional messiness of a tracked-up dune. With practice or a reliable GPS, you can be confident of where you are and where your personal trailhead is. And then, you can move slowly, let the light evolve, and make the patterns your own.

For unknown reasons in 2017, I decided to skip traveling the short distance – well within my ‘easy’ travel territory – to middle Oregon for the most recent total eclipse to intersect the lower 48 of the somewhat United States. I heard great things about the experience soon after. I knew I had made a mistake, and I would not make that mistake twice.

But how to plan for the midwestern arc of totality, in between fieldwork and work in general? I have a brother in Allen, Texas, just outside totality’s path, and he had recently planned a trip to Nevada to join in a high point excursion. He was coming here for the weekend following the eclipse – my travel calendar was shrinking. Complicating things were media reports of anticipated chaos and economic opportunity – not mutually exclusive things – given the extra pressure on roads, lodging, dining, restrooms, and eye protection due to the humanity that would descend on local communities. It was going to be a mess; governors premeditated various states of emergency to fund signage and overtime for law enforcement and septic companies.

There is always a lot of conversation, around the time of any eclipse, about how supposedly primitive societies might have responded to a suddenly darkened daytime sky. Any prehistoric response, say, founding a new religion or something, certainly paled against the silly panic, angst, and warnings that poured from media outlets regarding the upcoming event – all of which had little to do with a few minutes of darkness. A sign of the times, but it made me reconsider, briefly.

I decided to make it interesting. I would forego lodging and sleep, like any real photographer. I booked a flight leaving Reno at midnight; I landed in Dallas just before sunrise on the morning of the eclipse (April 8^th) – I would be on a return flight later tonight. Bryan, my brother, picked me up, and we drove toward east TX and the path of totality. There were clouds around, but the sky looked promising. We found breakfast in Paris (TX, of course) where all the servers sported shirts and caps commemorating “Totality 2024!”. It may have been slightly more crowded than your typical Monday morning, but most folks seemed to be locals. It was clear that many businesses, along with a few opportunistic entrepreneurs, had received the news of and planned for the coming throng.

We drove on, pretty much on our own. The sky thickened as we reached the path of totality; the forecast and actual clouds in all likelihood explaining our loneliness. We consulted satellite imagery to find clear skies in Oklahoma. Left turn, mate.

Bryan guides us over the Red River, the border between the states of Texas and Oklahoma. Although the river is mostly dry today, memories flood in. This is not a random drive in unknown lands. You see, I grew up near here and basically learned to drive and, more importantly, navigate on roads just like this. I got drunk for the first time on backroads that intersect this highway, buried my truck in the Red River floodplain (not drunk), chased hot air balloons, and delivered John Deere tractors (and retrieved them for repair) driving between the small ranches and farms of northeastern Texas counties built on one-mile, checkerboard squares. The air is redolent of experiences of my 20-year-old self, and, of course, we are driving; I have not outgrown any of this.

Chasing bits of blue sky in Oklahoma, we turn into a ‘Bigfoot’ gas station and store. There are lines of outhouses, but we are the only ones here. We get a coffee and buy a ‘Totality 2024!’ sticker from a pile on the counter. Everyone is friendly and hopeful, but the clouds are building. South it is, back across the river and deeper into Texas. We eventually pierce a bubble of clear sky, and we encounter our first cluster of eclipse hunters with a smattering of tripods, cameras, and scopes. Thinking they must know what they are doing, we turn off the highway to find a lonely cemetery with an attractive and generally open cluster of trees. Land access is basically non-existent – not the vast public lands I thrive in, so small parks and cemeteries seemed our best bet. I set up two cameras, one for a time-lapse through the trees and another with the telephoto for the iconic eclipse shot. The eclipse is high in the sky here in Texas (not something I considered at length), so getting imagery that might include some landscape context is impossible. The tree canopy will have to do.

**Partial**. Concerning clouds as totality approaches, Arkansas, USA

As I took some shots for composition and focus, I could see through the viewfinder that the clouds were encroaching on us yet again. The sun disappeared soon after. Spit. Satellite imagery showed clear skies in Arkansas. Why not? North once again, mate. Now we might be driving too fast, just saying.

**Perfection corner**. A random stop at a perfect time, Arkansas, USA (Photo: Bryan Young)

We retrace a few roads and turn east, crossing two state borders in quick succession. We take a random road into a lonely, hardscrabble townsite in the Arkansas woods – a few houses and as many crumbling cars and roaming dogs as you could count. Rolling onto some dirt tracks once the houses and dogs had thinned out, I could see ‘first contact’ as the moon began its perfect transit of the sun. I immediately remembered an empty field on the opposite side of town with an open bend in the road. That would have to be it; Bryan spun us around, we waved at the occupants of a car from Florida – first car in a while, and we avoided the town dogs to get to the open field.

I was set up as soon as we stopped rolling. A lonely chimney stood in front of us, a relic of a former homestead. The clouds seemed thin enough and, maybe, becoming thinner. After all our recent hurry, we now waited. I was set with my 100-500mm lens and solar filter, and could only focus on the iconic totality image, given that the sun was partially eclipsed already, and while I liked the landscape in front of me, the sun was high above all that. We were alone with the songbirds of the adjacent woodland. Not another person or car anywhere in sight, and this was a numbered and paved roadway. It is coming.

You have seen pictures of totality, and you will see a few more here. As the day of every eclipse approaches – partial, annular, or total, the images saturate our social media and news venues. The dark round disc and its corona, maybe a ‘diamond ring’, are burned into our retinas as if we had forgotten our protective glasses during the real thing. You know what the eclipse is going to look like, but still… Totality is here.

The build-up culminates in an otherworldly tint as our surroundings become muted and the contrast of bright sun and shadow is lost. And then suddenly – especially if this is your first totality – the sun simply bursts into brilliant corona and the black hole, where the sun was seconds ago, pulls your sight into its core. The feeling only lasts a few seconds as your mind grapples to process what it is seeing – it almost makes no sense; but then logic returns to the spectacle that it is, awesome and fun, maybe, truly once-in-a-lifetime. The birds have stopped singing – although there seems to be an American Robin who thinks morning is repeating itself; crickets chime in for similar reasons apparently. It is hilarious.

I take photos, but mostly focus on enjoying the event as an experience. My new photos are not any different than the thousands (or more) that are posted everywhere – I need to plan for a foreground and some context. They are, however, mine and provide memories of our unique experience – on a quiet road in Arkansas, exulting in and laughing at the spectacle above us. I would, and may, do it again.

‘Totality’ shops and food trucks look a little forlorn as we head toward DFW airport, backtracking through Paris, and stopping in Allen for dinner with my nephews and nieces. I am on a plane toward Nevada by midnight. Thanks Bryan, it was the best of times. All in a day.

Keep going.

Wandering White Sands

All in a day: Totality 2024