My 2020 Trip to New Mexico 3: White Sands NP and Cloudcroft

Good morning, afternoon, or whenever it is that you read this. This is the third and final part of my recollection from New Mexico in 2020. You can read the previous installment here. Alternatively, if you are new to the series, you can find the first part here. My destinations so far. From my KOA in Carlsbad, it is around 130 miles to Cloudcroft, and then White Sands NP is another 35-ish miles. I woke up a little before sunrise on my penultimate day in New Mexico. So far, I had seen two US National Parks on this trip, but a third was just on the horizon: White Sands National Park. If reaching the summit of Guadalupe Peak was the number one reason for the trip, White Sands was the number two reason. At the point I was visiting, White Sands had been a national park for around four months, having just received the designation in December of 2019. It had been a national monument since the early 1900s when commercial interests first started to consider destroying this unique land for…