Parks Peaks & Paths

A lunch stop while traveling through El Paso. Nearly 100 years old and still family-run, now in its fourth generation. The place was packed, full of character, and clearly a local favorite. The food was excellent.

Oliver Lee gave us a mountain-backed campsite, fascinating history, and a strong first impression of the Alamogordo side of the trip.

Home to the world's largest gypsum dune field, with miles of shifting white sand shaped by wind and time. The park offers longer hikes like the Alkali Flat Trail, shorter interpretive loops, and open dunes where you can wander, climb, and slide. It looks stark and empty, and while we didn’t see much life ourselves, the interpretive signs make it clear there’s more going on out there than meets the eye.

Alkali Flat Trail is a five-mile hike in White Sands National Park that heads out into the open dunes where there’s no real trail, just orange markers guiding you across constantly shifting sand. Soft footing that makes you work for every step, especially on the uphill climb. Exposed and repetitive, but also the best way to experience the scale of the dunes.

The New Mexico Museum of Space History in Alamogordo mixes space exploration and military history tied closely to the region, with exhibits on early rockets, the Trinity Test, and astronaut training. It’s informative, with a few lighter moments mixed in like the Star Trek display and HAM the chimp.

PistachioLand in Alamogordo is a classic roadside stop with the world’s largest pistachio out front. Busy when we passed through, with long lines for the store and tours, but the free samples and pistachio ice cream made it worth a quick stop.

The Toy Train Depot in Alamogordo is a railroad museum in a historic depot, with toy and model train displays and a detailed 1,000-square-foot model of 1940s Alamogordo. It ended up being a much more fun stop than expected, thanks largely to the volunteers and the personality of the collection.

The Cloudcroft Train Trestle area preserves railroad history just west of Alamagordo. After visiting the Toy Train Depot, we followed that train theme into the Sacramento Mountains, trading Alamogordo’s desert setting for a higher-elevation stop surrounded by ponderosa pines.