White Sands Visitor Center

White Sands Visitor Center is a historic adobe museum and information stop on US 70, just before Dunes Drive. If you want the park to make more sense before you head into the gypsum, this is a good first stop: get oriented at the ranger desk, look through the exhibits and watch the 17-minute film. The fee station is about a quarter-mile farther along Dunes Drive, so you don’t have to stop here to enter.

Refill your water here; there’s no water out in the dunefield. The trading post sells sleds, bottled water, packaged snacks and souvenirs, while the park store has a smaller souvenir selection. Don’t count on a meal: this is a packaged-food stop, with the nearest restaurants and gas stations in Alamogordo, about 13 miles away.

The visitor center is one building in the White Sands National Park Historic District, an eight-building group built between 1936 and 1940 and designated a historic district in 1990. Architect Lyle E. Bennett’s Pueblo Revival design blends Pueblo forms with Spanish mission details. The building’s thick adobe walls, carved corbels, handcrafted seating and tin light fixtures give you plenty to notice beyond the exhibits.

The exhibits include casts of ancient human footprints; the original tracks aren’t open to visitors. Sediment layers around some prints have been dated to roughly 23,000 and 21,000 years ago. One trackway has been interpreted as a woman walking nearly a mile with a toddler, whose smaller tracks appear and disappear as she picked the child up and set them down.

Those footprints were left around Lake Otero, an Ice Age lake that once filled the basin. As the water and vegetation disappeared, the trackways remained in the gypsum-rich landscape. Fossils from the basin include tracks of Columbian mammoths, giant ground sloths, dire wolves and American lions, a much older cast of characters than the dunes first suggest.

Two lots serve the center. Oversized RV and trailer spaces are limited to the south lot; the north lot has none, and tractor-trailers can’t park in the park. The visitor center also gives you a shady architectural stop before the sunny drive into the dunes.