The Guadalupe Salt Basin Teaches Lessons in Alchemy

The trail crests, and white sand dunes appear from out of nowhere: a seascape in the desert. We stand in a terrain that looks so out of place we might well be hallucinating. I climb a dune and gaze out like I’m standing on a shore, waiting for the tide to come back in. Here in the Guadalupe Salt Basin, you can feel the trace of water everywhere. Beyond the dunes, before the desert starts up again, lie the remains of an ancient lake—an expanse of white salt-crusted plains. The water dried up some 10,000 years ago, leaving behind salt deposits. Winds carried gypsum east from the lakebed. The grains hit the mountains we call the Guadalupes and landed here, forming dunes. It might be the quietest place I’ve ever been.

“Out in the open, with the solitude and quiet, there’s nowhere else like it,” park ranger Michael Haynie tells me. Haynie first saw the dunes in 1998, when he started working in Guadalupe Mountains National Park. Twenty-seven years later, he’s still captivated by their presence and the story they tell about water: “From the high tide to the high desert, from past abundance to present-day scarcity,” he says.

The sun appears first over El Capitan, illuminating its sharp angle as though the 8,000-foot peak is splicing a ray of light. And then, seemingly at once, brightness unfurls across the basin, flooding it in day. Ripples in the sand that a moment ago looked flat are suddenly cast in sharp shadows. Animal tracks—rabbits, a snake, hikers—come into focus. To witness such beauty feels like being let in on a secret. I recall a passage from the theorist Elaine Scarry’s book On Beauty and Being Just: “When we come upon beautiful things … they act like small tears in the surface of the world that pull us through to some vaster space.” The feeling refracts out here in this landscape already so vast—it’s like we’re being pulled through the surface of the present into the vaster space of time. We hike into the dunes like we are swimming in golden rays.

My late grandmother was the descendant of a Midwestern salt tycoon. But, the story went, she was “disowned.” (The word never sat well with me.) We were told the rupture was because she married a poor Catholic, but the full picture is not clear. My mother grew up in the same city as her grandparents but never met them, for they had disappeared from their daughter’s life like water from the rock salt they mined. Improbably, I was given their surname as my middle name. My grandmother was never that warm to me, and I speculated this was why. The broken lineage—how it floated around inside my name—bestowed on me an enduring curiosity about salt as a substance.

I am interested in the alchemy of it, how salt’s very presence is predicated on absence. Salt finds its form through water’s disappearance, and, like magic, it draws water out of what it encounters. Great protector against decay, it is our most talismanic mineral. In his book Salt: A World History, journalist Mark Kurlansky notes that babies in medieval France were salted in the crib until they were baptized. Salt of the earth. Salt in the wound. Covenant of salt. Worth your salt. Gold offers itself to metaphor, too, but we don’t eat it. We are hardwired to like the taste of salt because we must ingest it in order to survive. Salt binds us to water—and to time. I fell in love with a man from Greece, where salt is said to ward off bad luck.

The Greek and I were getting married soon. A selectively superstitious person, I was looking for an encounter with salt on a large scale as some sort of self-styled pre-wedding blessing. I knew this was the place. From the summit of Guadalupe Peak years earlier, I’d seen the Salt Basin—a stretch of white punctuating the Chihuahuan Desert—and always wanted to return. We had plans to spend Christmas out west in Big Bend, and I invited the detour.

In the afternoon, we take US 62 north of Dell City to see the salt up close. If the gypsum dunes evoke the sea, the salt flats—white, slightly dimpled, glistening—evoke the surface of the moon. Motorists, enthralled by the lunar landscape, tend to drive onto it and get stuck. I understand the impulse. Walking out onto the flats, I take a pinch of the moonscape to my mouth: salt.

I imagine whoever sees these flats for the first time would do the same. In 1692, an Apache man taken prisoner by the Spanish led 20 soldiers on a four-day trek to show them the salt—these deposits have been sacred to Indigenous communities for millennia. The Spanish and their descendants, the Paseños, would come to harvest, extract, and trade the mineral, for it preserved food, tanned hides, and was a component in silver mining. Under Spanish law, the salt flats were considered communal property. This precedent remained in place upon Mexican independence and even after 1848, when Mexico ceded its northern territories. Things changed after the Civil War, when the Texas Constitution allowed individuals to lay claim to mineral rights, and Anglo businessmen wrangled for the Guadalupe Salt Basin. In 1877, Paseños took up arms to defend what they still considered theirs. A war broke out and more than two dozen lives were lost. Ultimately, the Anglos got their way—and the salt. But eventually agriculture in nearby Dell City depleted the water tables to levels that rendered the salt deposits too scant to make a profit harvesting them. Today, to passersby, they’re just another roadside oddity.

Some drivers going to or from Guadalupe Mountains National Park pull over. Children play, bouncing on the unfamiliar texture: not beach sand, not dirt. A labradoodle runs in circles. Two Italians from Bologna walk far out. “You can’t even compare driving here to driving in Italy,” one says, noting a fondness for highways less traveled, roads where you drive an hour and see only two cars and one half-abandoned town. I notice that El Capitan from this angle looks like the bow of a ship steering the escarpment. A history buff from Minnesota tells me El Capitan was like a signpost for westward explorers in centuries past: Turn here.

A light show begins. The salt turns golden, silver, blue, pink. As the peaks of the Guadalupes glow incandescent magenta, the Greek takes my hand, and we walk across the salt into the purple light. The last embers of the day burn from the horizon, and then the stars turn on. If not for the lights of passing trucks, you’d feel like you were suspended outside of time, or lodged deep within it. The beauty of the night sky is so overwhelming I wish I could brine this moment—but that’s what memory is for.