After getting our permit for The Wave, we stopped for lunch at the Paria Scenic Viewpoint and then drove a dangerous, rutted, unpaved road down toward the Paria Ghost Town. The road got far too steep and treacherous and we were worried we wouldn’t make it back up, so we stopped the car at a pull off and continued down on foot.
One of Pearson’s first memories is watching, live on TV, the Space Shuttle Columbia land at the White Sands Test Facility and he’s been enamored with White Sands, New Mexico ever since. So on our way out to California, we made a plan to stop and explore White Sands National Monument for a few days.
Adjacent to the National Monument is the NASA Test Facility, an Army Missile Range, and Holloman Air Force Base, so the National Monument and Route 70, the road from Alamogordo to Las Cruces, is closed quite often. Unfortunately, a week before we arrived in White Sands an unmanned drone on some sort of training mission crashed in the National Monument and they closed the entire park until further notice. Continue reading
After a month in California (blogs on this to come) we had to head back east for The Long Bike Back screenings and we decided to take our time and drive across the Utah/Arizona border because there are so many amazing things to see there. I have seen The Wave (in the Vermillion Cliffs National Monument) on a couple of ‘top 10 places to see in the world’ lists and since it’s right on the Utah/Arizona border we scheduled it into our meandering drive east. Continue reading
