I am Andrea Fanelli and I am a landscape photographer from Boston. My girlfriend and I decided to camp overnight at the White Sands National Monument in New Mexico, USA. The White Sands National Monument is an incredibly beautiful place, a 275 square miles field of white sand dunes.

I wanted to take photos of the Perseid shower in a really dark place. The park has a 5 miles trail that goes far from the car parking and into the dunes, with a few places where to put the tent. Unexpectedly, right before sunset, the sky got very very dark. Rain and storms in the desert are particularly rare, so we were not really considering the possibility of the storm moving in our direction.

After probably half an hour, we realized that the storm was rolling in our direction, with a mix of torrential rain, sand and incredibly strong wind. My girlfriend and I didn’t know whether to stay in the tent and face the storm or dismount everything and run the 30 minutes hike back to the car. I was really worried that if we left, we would have been in the middle of storm without any cover and zero visibility, with the risk of getting lost in the desert.

When the storm was right on top of our tent, we decided to dismount the tent and literally run back to the car. We made it back to the car just on time! I didn’t get any photo of the Perseid meteor shower, but I got some awesome photos of the storm rolling in!

More info: Instagram

White Sands National park is an incredible desert with white sands dunes

The storm in the distance starts being more and more aggressive

A scary mix of wind, rain and sand gets closer and closer

You can see the storm only few dunes away

At this point the sky over our tent was completely overcast. This is when we decided to dismount the tent and run back to the car

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