White Sands National Park: Ghost Tracks, Missile Ranges & Legends

This week Susan and Monica cover White Sands National Park — our 62nd of 63 — and there's way more going on here than sand. We get into why it sat as a "national monument" for 86 years before finally becoming a national park in 2019 (spoiler: it involved a defense bill), why the park sometimes has to shut its only road down for active missile testing next door, and the 21,000–23,000-year-old human footprints that are rewriting what we know about the first people in North America.

Plus: the Mescalero Apache and early farming cultures who called this basin home, a ghost story called Pavla Blanca, and an honest-to-goodness unsolved 1896 disappearance.

📍 Featured: Dune Drive, the White Sands Missile Range, the fossil footprint fields

🥾 Good to know: check road closures before you go — missile testing can shut the only way in for hours

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