Second-day road log, from Alamogordo to Tularosa, Rhodes Canyon, Lake Lucero, and return to Alamogordo
— Katherine A. Giles, Spencer G. Lucas, Virgil W. Lueth, and Robert G. Myers

Today's trip examines the classic section of Paleozoic strata exposed in the San Andres Mountains and Pleistocene-Recent basin-floor lacustrine and eolian deposits of the Tularosa Basin. The trip begins by retracing yesterday's route north to Tularosa and then west to enter the White Sands Missile Range via the Tularosa gate on Range Road 6. Then, instead of heading north to the Carrizozo lava flows along Range Road 9, we proceed due west across the floor of the Tularosa Basin on Range Road 6 to the eastern flank of the San Andres Mountains at Rhodes Canyon.

The drive westward through Rhodes Canyon allows us to examine, in ascending stratigraphic order, more than 7000 ft of Paleozoic strata. Stops feature outcrops of Proterozoic, Cambrian, Ordovician, Pennsylvanian and Permian rocks. A stop at the Bear Den Canyon fault also allows us to examine a portion of the Devonian-Mississippian section and problems of local structure. The tour culminates at Rhodes Pass, where we turn around and retrace our route eastward to the floor of the Tularosa Basin. The trip then proceeds south, driving along the western edge of Alkali Flat and Lake Lucero, remnants of the Late Pleistocene Lake Otero, which once inundated an estimated 700 mi² of the Tularosa Basin floor. Our last stop examines sediments of Lake Otero and mammoth tracks impressed near its paleo-shoreline.