Visting White Sand Dunes National Park & Cloudcroft, New Mexico
We booked Alamogordo KOA with the intent to explore White Sand Dunes National Park not knowing we would have even more reasons to explore and enjoy the area. Alamogordo itself is not a picturesque town, let’s be honest. Driving in didn’t leave a great impression and we caught ourselves looking at each other with that expression of, '“well we may not stay here long”. We had an Amazon delivery coming to the KOA office and wanted to see the National Park. Once that was completed we would probably be on our way. Wrong!
The KOA was nice and we stayed directly across from the playground with level sites and lots of great amenities and flat level RV sites. Much to our surprise, upon arriving, the campground employee informed us that whatever day we planned to go into the park we could rent sleds and wax for the day directly at the front office. Now, you can visit White Sand Dunes in one day easily, but we broke it up into two days. One day for hiking and sunset and the next day for sledding! While there are no campgrounds in the park you can get a permit to do some back country camping. Due to it being a dark sky area I can imagine that seeing the stars from the top of a dune and enjoying the sunrises and sunsets in this park from the backcountry is incredible!
There are 5 hiking trails in White Sand Dunes National Park. And every hike is pet friendly! In fact, the entire park, besides the buildings, are pet friendly. We hiked three trails and they were the easiest trails in the park; The Dune Life Nature Trail, The Playa Trail, and the Interdune Trail. All of these trails were educational and offered amazing views of the dunes with the Sacramento mountains in the distant. You can hike the longer trails in the park like the Back Country Hiking Trail and the Alkali Flat Trail that can take anywhere from 2 to 5 hours. Make sure you stop at the ranger station to see which trails are open. This landscape is shared with Holloman Air Force Base to the west and sometimes the trails are closed due to military activity. If you are lucky while at the top of a dune you may be able to watch jet fighters flying by!
Our hike was in the late afternoon so we enjoyed the sunset from the dunes and I can not recommend this enough. Stay until it gets dark! There is something about the glow around the mountains and how the light shines off the dunes that creates an array of colors that change quickly. You will want to be there to catch all the colors.
On day two we headed back to the park in the morning with sleds in tow! We stayed for hours just sledding to our hearts content. You can see a sledding reel here. Highly recommend going with wax for your sleds. Without it we didn’t move as fast. when you drive in you can literally pick any parking area and just start walking up any dune you want to sled. It is a workout but so worth it! We were in the park in February and it was the perfect temp and the sand was cool not hot.
The following day our package from Amazon had arrived! Our GEO PRO 20BHS had a very tiny kitchen and we wanted more counter space. We found brackets that would allow us to attach a cutting board to the side of the cabinet that could be flipped up or down depending on the need. It was a total game changer! If you are looking to add more space to your countertops this is an easy and inexpensive addition. Just pull out the drawers or anything that is in the cabinet space and add wood strips to drill into on the interior of the cabinet to hold your brackets in place. The cabinet walls themselves are not strong enough so you will need to go to a hardwrae store to buy some inexpensive wood to attach too. And within 30 minutes you have more kitchen! You can find the brackets we used here. They have lasted four years with no fail!
While we were here we heard about a town called Cloudcroft up in the Lincoln National Forest and decided we needed to take a drive to see it. We got there just in time for the lunch hunger pains to set in and made a beeline for Cloudcroft Brewery to grab some pizza and try a few beers. Everything was absolutely delicious and the atmosphere was awesome! With very full bellies we started to walk the town that was full of adorable shops and tons of local artists works. After some shopping we headed back down the mountain. If you decide to go up to Cloudcroft I highly recommend you carve out more time than we did. Because it is surrounded by The Lincoln National Forest there are alot of great hiking trails and when we find ourselves back there again we will start the day with a hike, lunch at the brewery, shopping in the afternoon and a stop at the Old Apple Barn on the way back to Alamogordo. We did manage to stop in at the historic Old Apple Barn and grabbed some fudge and apple pie but it took longer than we thought. This Barn is filled with what seems an almost impossible amount of vintage toys and gifts from ceiling to floor. So take your time in there because there is alot to see!
While we spent more time than we expected in Alamogordo we could have easily spent more time enjoying this slice of New Mexico and highly recommend that you do. But if you only have a weekend, The White Sand Dunes National Park and Cloudcroft are the perfect match of outdoor fun and old time charm. We hope you enjoy it! We sure did!