Things have never been the same after July 16, 1945 when they blew up the "gadget" on the northern fringes of the White Sands Missile Range in southern New Mexico, the largest military installation in the United States. Regrettably called the Trinity site, this historic landmark is where an atomic bomb perched atop a 100-foot tower made quite the splash as the first of its kind, casting radioactive fallout far and wide, most of which drifted north and east. But lingering radioactive contamination from that 200-yard-wide fireball that melted sand to glass was the least of my worries as I wandered dazed and delighted through the heart of 115-square-miles of rolling dunes within White Sands National Monument (WSNM), roughly 60 miles south of that exploding nuclear implosion. I was more worried about going blind without my sunglasses, slogging among sugar-white, rippling hills of bone-dry snow, up one cone and down the other, or getting turned around out there and dying a lonely parched death by thirst among the vastness, swallowed up by a rolling ocean of bleached gypsum with camera in hand, clicking and snapping as I captured in digital bits and bytes the end of my life and the perennially shifting contours of this grainy surface of moon on earth.

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