On our last day in the Tularosa Basin area, I must mention the trains and jets. Many trains with double-stacked cargo boxes go through this area every day. We hear the whistles while in Alamogordo. With Halloman Air Force Base just outside of Alamogordo, we hear fighter jet engines and see F-16s flying formations overhead. White Sands is a really good place to watch these formations and we saw one pair come close together then fly apart while we were here today at this site. I miss seeing the fighter jets over the skies of Des Moines.

Just north of Tularosa and Alamogordo (which means fat cottonwood) and due west of Sierra Blanca is the Three Rivers Petroglyph Site. This is BLM land, so our America the Beautiful national pass works here. There is a very small campground and two short trails to hike.

The petroglyphs (art carved into rock) are along a trail that is 1-mile in length total. There are over 21000 carvings here, and it is helpful to have the park pamphlet on a phone to read about various highlighted carvings. These are not protected from hikers, so it might be hard to tell what is ancient and what are modern additions. For example, I saw a beautiful rendition of an Aoudad sheep, but these are non-native imports from the twentieth century, and the art did not stylistically match the work of the Jornada Mogollon ancient peoples. I didn’t photograph it.

It’s windy today, and when we looked out over the basin toward White Sands, we could see sand in the air above the dunes. We are so thankful that the previous two days were perfect for visiting, as today looks like irritated eyes and low visibility.

A short Village Trail, paved with hard-packed sand, showed some pit house ruins from a prehistoric village that were excavated in the 1970s. My mom would have loved this site, especially the numerous petroglyphs!🩷

On our way back to Alamogordo, we stopped to eat at Casa De Suenos in Tularosa, where we tried avocado borracho with a jalapeño ranch sauce as an appetizer before our lunch plates. Deep fried anything is pretty good, and these were delicious.