White Sands National Monument is in the northern Chihuahuan Desert in the U.S. state of New Mexico. It's known for its dramatic landscape of rare white gypsum sand dunes. West of Alamogordo, a vast area of desert and mountain ranges 100 by 40 miles in extent is closed to public access and used by the military for various kinds of weapons testing; this includes the Trinity Site where the first atomic bomb was detonated, in July 1945. I love to walk the dunes barefoot, to ground myself with Mother Earth. For me  White Sands is a sacred space where I can walk for miles and hours on end. If you plan to visit, carry water, drop a pin of where you parked, it is easy to disorient yourself and get lost, no cell service back in the dunes.