We are one year to the day again. After our first week on the road in the US, we felt that we had seen and experienced about a months worth of sounds, sights and overly filled plates of food. Today we have entered New Mexico. We are taking a little detour to visit the White Sands National Monument. White Sands covers 275 square miles of desert. The dunes are constantly shifting, therefore creating an ever changing landscape. The sand is not sand as we know it, it's pure gypsum (hydrous calcium sulfate) (science lesson over). This area is just amazing, as are the surrounds. Both Ansel Adams and Edward Weston spent time photographing the dunes in the 40's. Edward Weston in fact produced some of his later work here in 1946 only two years before he was unable to photograph any longer due to Parkinson's.
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| Simon Hewson©2012 |
Aside from Weston and Adams making photographs here, 1945 was a very important year for this area, if not the world. Around 50 miles north of this natural wonder a very unnatural wonder was unfolding. On the 16th of July 1945 the first atomic bomb was tested at the trinity test site within the White Sands Missile Range, this was the test for what was later used in anger at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. How can such natural beauty and such man-made ugliness co-exist? The image below was made at a rest stop on U.S. Route 70 en-route to White Sands National Monument.
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| Simon Hewson©2012 |
