The Valley of Fires, located just west of Carrizozo, New Mexico, is part of the Rio Grande Rift – a north-south trending fault system along which the Jemez Caldera and Sandia Mountains have formed. The Valley of Fires consists of volcanic flows that are among the youngest in the continental United States. They erupted from a crater north of Carrizozo and flowed down the Tularosa Valley. White Sands is the world’s largest gypsum dune field. The sand is composed of the mineral gypsum rather than silica as are most sand dunes in the world, such as the Great Sand Dunes in southern Colorado. This course covers the rare set of circumstances that caused these beautiful white gypsum dunes to form in the Tularosa Basin.