Boris Stoyanov
White Sands Mappings
Columbia GSAPP
Spring 2024
White Sands National Park, New Mexico
Professor Regina Teng
White Sands National Park is a landscape of contradiction—pristine yet scarred, ancient yet continuously altered by human intervention. Its vast gypsum dunes, the largest in the world, create an otherworldly terrain where the ground reflects sunlight and remains cool underfoot. Unlike silica sands, which erode into river systems, gypsum dissolves in water, making its presence here a geological anomaly. This fragile landscape, shaped by wind and time, holds traces of some of the earliest human inhabitants of North America. Fossilized footprints, dating back over 20,000 years, mark the passage of Ice Age travelers across the wet gypsum flats, their steps preserved as the mud hardened. Alongside them, remnants of fire pits offer evidence of temporary settlements, fleeting moments of habitation in a place always in flux. But here, fire did more than leave behind ash—it transformed the gypsum, turning it into a form of plaster. What remains is not just a trace of presence but a fossil of energy itself, a physical imprint of heat and human touch that has endured for millennia.
Though protected as a national park, White Sands is not untouched wilderness. It exists within the boundaries of the White Sands Missile Range, an active military testing ground, where experimental weapons are launched over the same terrain that preserved the footprints of mammoth hunters. Just beyond the park lies the Trinity Site, where the first atomic bomb was detonated in 1945, altering the course of history and leaving invisible but lasting scars on the land. Even the Space Shuttle program once designated the gypsum flats as an emergency landing strip, reinforcing the park’s entanglement with military and technological ambition. These mappings explore the layered damage inflicted on White Sands—from the traces of early human settlement to the profound transformations imposed by war, industry, and scientific progress. The dunes shift and reform, constantly rewriting the surface, but the imprints—whether footprints, fossilized fire pits, bomb craters, or shuttle landing strips—remain embedded in the land’s memory.