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

Two Chicks with Hiking Sticks · Sep 24, 2026 · 28m

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…