Vance Holliday jumped at the invitation to go do geology at New Mexico’s White Sands. The landscape, just west of Alamogordo, looks surreal—endless, rolling dunes of fine beige gypsum, left behind by ancient seas. It’s one of the most unique geologic features in the world.
But a national park protects much of the area’s natural resources, and the U.S. Army uses an adjacent swath as a missile range, making research at White Sands impossible much of the time.
So it was an easy call for Holliday, a University of Arizona archaeologist and geologist, to accept an invitation in 2012 to do research in the park. While he was there, he asked, skeptically, if he could look at a site on the missile range.