Now that Dave B has reached the lofty heights of sixty five years well-lived, we expect that he will start to shrink, begin wearing fedoras, drive with his turn signal on all the time, and start forgetting all of those distant childhood memories (and things that happened yesterday). There's not much we can do about the first three but we thought we might help with some replacement childhood memories. We tried to track down a bouncy castle for him but we had to settle for a day of tobogganing- there was no snow in the neighbourhood but there was a huge national park filled with snow-white sand dunes. And just to add a little excitement to the mix, White Sands National Monument sometimes closes when the adjacent White Sands Missile Range is actively testing the latest in U.S. military hardware (the missile range hosted the site used for the first atomic bomb test, codenamed Trinity, so you don’t ignore the warnings when they close the park). Errant missiles often fell on WSNM property, in some cases destroying some of the visitor areas.

The area is in the mountain-ringed Tularosa Basin and comprises the southern part of a 710 km2 field of white sand dunes composed of gypsum crystals. It is the largest gypsum dune field in the world. Gypsum is rarely found in the form of sand because it is water-soluble. Normally, rain would dissolve the gypsum and carry it to the sea but since the basin is enclosed and has no outlet to the sea so water either sinks into the ground or forms shallow pools which subsequently dry out and leave gypsum in a crystalline form. For soon-to-be dune tobogganing fanatics the good news for us was that the gypsum does not readily convert the sun's energy into heat and thus can be walked upon safely with bare feet, even in the hottest summer months.

Sand surfing while sitting on a plastic disc was actually a Dave-friendly event (and his increasingly brittle bone structure) as the sand provided a soft landing for all of the many downhill crashes we ended up in.

After clearing sand from the many body crevices that sand shouldn’t be in we drove over to the nearby White Sands Military Base to take in the museum and rocket garden (yes- a garden filled with rockets of all descriptions). White Sands is a working military facility with tight security and although Dave flashed his plastic retired police badge, the gate security officer was clearly reluctant to allow shady-looking Canadians on to the base. When DH added her badge to the mix he started to relent- not sure if it was the cleavage (Dave and/or DH’s) or the two glistening badges (Dave and/or DH’s), but he did let us in. It was definitely a worthwhile, if somewhat intimidating stop.

With this childhood memory filed away, we were off to create a whole new set of kiddie cowboy memories that Deb B can capture on her iphone in order to play it back to Dave when the memory starts to fade.