Five minutes into my hike at White Sands I stopped to look around. In every direction of this national monument in southeast New Mexico, there was nothing but white, white, white-endless rolling hills of it. I was standing in the largest field of white gypsum in the world, and I was consumed by it already, as if it were literally endless and not just seemingly so. I knew my car was just over there, not even a quarter-mile over that ridge, but it might as well have been another world away.
I adjusted my backpack, marveled at the crisp horizon - the blue of the sky deeper and richer because of the white below it-and followed the trail to my campsite, one of only IO in the 275 square miles at White Sands. In the next 12 hours I would see only two people.
One of them was a 20-something woman who had arrived at the trailhead at the same time I did. We hiked in together. She told me she was killing time, traveling around the West, Kerouac with an ankle tat and an lnstagram account. By contrast, I drove in from a Professional Work Conference, where I had spent the last few days
