White Sands National Monument

Sprawling across more than 71,000 hectares of southern New Mexico (about a 360-kilometer drive south of Albuquerque), White Sands National Monument looks as though it jumped off the pages of a luxury travel magazine’s beach issue — except there’s no ocean. Instead, the world’s largest gypsum sand dune field rolls on as far as the eye can see, with only the occasional tuft of grass or ground squirrel interrupting the landscape.