I'm sorry, the pictures available in here are skimpy. I'm a kinda existentialist type road tripper, not a pop-up-one-meta-level-and-record-my-enjoyment type tourist.
HEY! Clicking one of these arrow thingies scattered about will
return you to this spot if you get bored or lost.
New Mexico is pretty much my favorite place to visit. Open space, red dirt, friendly wierdos, poverty, and the highest per-capita drowning rate of any state in the U.S. The population is made up of, in descending order, Mexican, Native American, other people from points south, white military males, white trash, Los Angeles yuppie scum, and perverted "scientists" in the military/space/nuke/spy biz.
New Mexico also has a pretty interesting recent history of non-mainstream white (mostly) rebellious types. The people who fled the hippyization of places like San Francisco and such, came here and started various odd projects, most of which died off of course, or turned into reactionary survivalist pot-growers like in Nothern Cal, but there was some genuine interesting stuff done, and lots of it survives.
For example, Harry Hay, one of the founders of the gay-male-liberation group the Mattachine Society, came here and lived and worked amongst some people along the Rio Grande, in one of those rare honest working-together type things. He brought his organizing skills and learned about community. (Harry later founded the Radical Faeries, a gay-male group attempting to merge pagan stuff with politics and personal growth; I won't hold it against him that it's mainly spawned a bunch of self-righteous airhead middle-class snobs with pretentious and silly names.) Where was I.
So New Mexico has been invaded over the years with lots of weirdos, and since it's basically a very poor state with not much comercially-consumables (water, trees, malls, that sort of thing) that it's only recently being overrun with the consumer culture steamroller that's neutered and beiged places like Colorado.
In no particular order:
VERY LARGE ARRAY, Plains of San Augustin. On Route 60, about 90 mi. E of Arizona border. Closest map item, Datil Campground. The Plains of San Augustin is this 30 mile wide flat plain, flat as a pancake. High altitude, utterly miserable weather in the winter. Flat, flat, flat. As you drive into the bowl, you see... humongous dish antennas horizon to horizon. (Picture:38K) The VLA is a giant (27 mile) radio telescope, consisting of an array of 150-foot diameter (I think) dishes. There's about 20 - 30 of these "portable" dishes, paid out on a "Y" shaped array. Each disk consists of a giant building with electronics and a gymbal, cyrogenic equip (for the low-noise amps), etc. Each is about 200 feet tall. In September, horrid mosquitos, which hang out on the moo cows waiting for humans to stop moving about so much.
We're talking High Nerd. There is a vistors center, with a self-guided tour, and fannish stuff you can buy. There's a bunch of boring dioramas (though the first time I was there, there was an automated 5-minute video presentation about, I am not kidding, Fourier Transforms), but you get to walk all around the site, peering into buildings, etc. If you're lucky, the dishes will move to a new focal point (since the earth is constantly rotating, they can only look at one place for so long) and it's rather disturbing; out in the silent desert with a bunch of dumb moo-cows standing around, and all these things the size of police stations start groaning and seemingly hurtling accross the sky.
What's weird is that it's a movable array. Think of it as a 27-mile wide dish, with holes in it. A few holes, no problem. Well, think of the hols getting bigger and bigger... until it's about 99.9% hole with little tiny signal-gathering spots. Really. Big Fourier-transforms are done to reconstruct the image gathered from each of the antennas. Weak signal, great resolution.
So about 8 times a year, they have this MONSTER crawler that picks up each gargantuan antenna, and moves it onto these fixed pads acattered accross the plain. This thing is so huge -- there are two full-guage railroad tracks about ten feet apart that the crawler *straddles*.
The DATIL CAMPGROUND is a free campground, with really great tasty water. Back when they used to march giant herds of proto-hamburger beasts across the desert to the rail centers (like Las Vegas, NM), this was one of the water stops. And around here you get really amazing sky jobs here (picture:28K). There's reportedly a big white-nationalist-survivalist group in Datil, but I never seen 'em. Just adds to the excitement!
TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES,
Route 25, about 150 mi. South of Albuquerque. A pretty grotty
town, hot as fucken hell, claim to fame is it's named after an old
TV show, on which the host offered $25,000 if some town would name
themselves after the show? Or something equally ridiculuous. T or
C obviously partook. The biggest body of water in NM, man-made of
course, the Elephant Butte ('byoot' not 'butt', buttheads) Resevoir.
RV hell. Skip this. Well if you're driving south on 25 you'll almost
certainly stop there. You really don't have any choice.
Erika tells me that it's undergoing some sort of transformation,
and become tres' chic or something. Wow! The weirdness factor is
high here, and Route 25 is kinda dull, so likely you'll eat here
and get gas (I just made that up).
Well, buzz around here was that some artists had moved down there
and were starting to groovafy the place, but then I talked to
someone who just bought a house there. She said that it's still
really depressed, mostly retired folks, course she's moving there
away from Madrid (the ex-lawless hippie town on Hwy 14 near Cerrillos)
because it's getting too crowded and full of New York yups, so she
wouldn't really want people to think it's too cool. The thing
that's kind of funny about the place is that in the summer on 4th
of July and Memorial day T or C is the second largest city in the
state because of all the assholes that come to Elephant But(te)
Lake to drink beer and fallout of their boats and drown because
they can't swim because hey, NM is the desert. Anyways, TorC has
a bunch of funky old hot springs motels. It used to be called Hot
Springs until they got paid to change it by the old tv show. So it
seems like there is a miniscule amount of{ speculation in groovyness,
but nothing majo{ Hey, are th{s{ ~rat{n{o{{{_yix{ni{t?o] 6{x
{AWQocW|{
LAS CRUCES, Route 25, 220
mi. S of Albuquerque. I know nothing about it, except I drove
through it. Once, in 1991. I will visit and report back. I bet the
surplus stores down here are real cool.
GILA
CLIFF-DWELLERS NATIONAL MONUMENT. 30 mi. N of Silver City,
SW corner. My my, is this remote! There is a tiny switchback road
that goes on *forever*. It's hot, and at high altitude. It's pretty
much worth it.
The cliff dwellings are pretty cool. They're in a tiny, rich shady
valley, you can totally understand why people chose this spot. It's
all weirdo new geology. Lots of little, shallow caves. There's a
smallish brook, that was probably a small river 1000 years ago.
You could live off it even now I think. The aforementioned dwellings
are really giant overhangs, where the rocks spalled off.
Amphitheatre-like. People built up walls, rooms, etc with local
rocks. Pretty neat. Cold in winter, brr. All the ceilings are
pitch-black with soot from hundreds of years of fires. All in all,
pretty civilized living. According to the white-boy experts, it
was more of a shared motel along a well-traveled route, than a
permanent community, though my memory is fuzzy on details. Also if
I remember right, they claimed there was three or so distinct sets
of construction, which did seem evident.
Route 180 and 10 to Silver City are pretty dull. Silver City looks
awful to me. It was all strip malls, car dealerships, etc. Yuck.
A much better drive is Route 152. Long twisting passages, all
different. Hits Route 25 just S of T or C.
ALAMOGORDO, Route 54, south
and central NM. Pretty sleepy and militaristic, but has the WAY
COOL Space Museum. Very high Nerd Factor. (I drove 400 mi. out of
my way to visit this past September just to go there, my second
visit.) Seeing how Alamogordo is smack in the middle of the White
Sands Missile Base, you'd expect the Space Museum to be nothing by
idiotic flag-waving extremism. Nope! As you enter the museum (four
floors, you start on the top, working your way down, and "up" in
time) you are greeted with xUSSR people and stuff. They give credit
where due. Good for them! (I mean, in this particular venture,
the US blew everyone away with the world-war-like deployment of
gigatons of low-tech space gear! It's not much of a contest, there's
no need to gloat.)
None of the displays are too far outside what you'd expect, though
it's pretty good overall. Don't be mistaken -- Smithsonian it's
not. If you take your time, you get through in a few hours.
My favorite period is the Apollo stuff, for many reasons, both
obvious and non-. The moon landing is really a peculiar thing in
U.S. history. Considering the scale of the project and how much
it was part of the public discourse at the time, it's all but
forgotten. (Erika pointed out, it was amongst other things a big
Democrat project, and when Reagan et al crawled in, they flushed
all that shit away. As inane a project as it was, it at least
embodied a sort of idiotic enthusiasm and optimism, distinctly
absent now.)
But anyways -- the striking impression of the Apollo project is --
BRUTE FORCE. It was completely fucking inelegant. I mean, you just
gotta see this stuff to realize, just how macho a project it was.
These Air Force type "super jock" pilots ran this crude -- I mean,
like no computers man! -- manually-tweaked machine 238K miles out
and back. Courses were plotted on the ground, and the pilots made
course corrections manually!
But it all reminds me of the overriding aesthetic of my youth, age
8 - 12; machined aluminum, teflon, fiberglas and red silicome
rubber. Nuvistor and acorn tubes. Surplus Dynamotors. Germanium.
6L6's. Cordwood subassemblies. Ceramics and hand-wound coils. Ahh,
youth.
Outside the building is space-detritus laying about. And a real,
whole Saturn-V engine! You just have to see one. I want to *own*
one! I would build a house around it, and mount it, with it's
combustion nozzle (an intricate assembly in itself) attached, and
let people climb on it. This particular model is just laying on
it's shipping frame, you can crawl over it, and if you're particularly
enterprising, remove parts. I did! It was made by Rocketdyne! Can
you imagine working for a company called Rocketdyne, and making
nasty chemical motors to put "men" on the moon! Wow!
NERD ALERT: I would trade just about *anything* for a Rocketdyne sew-on
patch, from a jacket, etc. Seriously. Write me at tomj @ wps . com.
About four years back I met a sysop of one of the local FidoNet
BBSs in a NAPA parking lot. Spotted by my license plate! Hi again!
ROSWELL, Route 285, SE quadrant.
Pretty much a sleepy smallish town, it has a few notables. There's
an art museum that has tons of Robert Goddard stuff. What a hacker!
The rocket guy, of course. He was basically run out of some town
in Massachusetts, where anything new gets you on the locals shitlist.
Goddard was a premier Hacker Wizard Supreme of hardware. I mean
this guy built *elegant* stuff. Spare, lean, smart, crude where
appropriate and watch-like interiors. Each component served multiple
functions, everything synergistically interlocking. Fuel under
pressure drove the gyroscopes, ran the turbochargers, cooled the
combustion chamber. This is 19-fucking-20! Wow! It is so totally
appropriately in an art museum.
Speaking of which, Erika tells me there's some big art Patron in
Roswell, that funds some sort of internship program, that puts up
artists and pays them some money to do their stuff. Pretty cool.
The local university does a lot of weather research, and published
an incredibly obscure book I read about a mountain-top lightening
research center, complete with metal-domed lightening strike/observation
chamber.
Just outside of town is the
BOTTOMLESS LAKES STATE PARK. Well, rest assured
they're not bottomless, though I suppose in dry NM the 400? feet
depth seems so. The "lakes" are really oddball sinkholes, a hundred
or so feet across. They are exceedingly creepy, in a rugged broken
rock salty wash area, surrounded with shrubbery-looking tree things,
you wonder what sort of things are down there. Murky water with
scary skittering bugs. Cool!
CARLSBAD CAVERNS in
Carlsbad, S corner, on Route 285 is in really beautiful desolate
country. It's also where the fucking feds wanna dump commercial
and fed nuke waste via the "WIPP" (Waste Interrment Project
P-something). A big scame. These dimwits, want to put stuff into
underground salt domes. Duh. #WIPP graphic#
The cavern is really cool, in spite of it being a total tourist
trap. Luckily it's way out in the middle of *nowhere*, so people
don't just drop in. You take this looong elevator dooown. The
underground landscape is gigantic and utterly alien. Makes you want
to live there. (Alas the nearest fag-run cafe is 300 miles away! Never
mind!)
When I was there, 1990?, it looked like all the dykes in the area
got jobs there. It was cool! All these butch women instead of
Dudley-Do-rights. Take a drive through the LIVING DESERT State
Park, it looks like a damned garden, what with the high-desert
flora stuff around. Unless that goddamn WIPP (Waste Interrment
Project) idiocy goes through, where the feds and crooked contractors
wanna bury nuke waste in natural salt domes. Duh.
GALLUP, on Route 40 at the
Arizona border, doesn't have much going for it really, but it kinda
grows on me as I pass through it, more and more. It has a long,
ugly strip along side a railroad. It's quite a rail center, still.
The main reason I go here is to buy LPG, and you pass through it
when you start off through the Three Mesas, up Route 666. One of
these days I'll steal myself a sign...
AZTEC is a place all the yups rave
about. It looks definitely far different than the surrounding towns.
Mostly you'll notice the Whole Earth-type aeasthetic has overrun
everything. Lots of shoppes selling Nice Things. It's related to
the ski biz in S. Colorado. Probably people from Farmington drive
to buy food in the natural food stores here. I'd sure as fuck would
rather be a bored tenager in Aztec than Farmington!
CHACO CANYON, in the NW
quadrant is well-known but little-traveled. Mainly because it's
a 30-mile *dirt* washboard road. Some of my dashboard instrumentation
literally shook to pieces. Also, it's about 10,000 degrees hot so
your windows are down, and when a vehicle passes you a bucket of
fine sand filters over all of your stuff.
I was there on the Fourth of July weekend, in the campground, and
there were still extra space left. I did not see any fire works,
and the only drunks were a bunch of Apple employees who had flown
to some place then drove rented Yupmobiles to have a big beer/foodfest.
They were quite civil however. There was also one damn Winnebago
clone, scourge of the highways, with a goddamn fucking GENERATOR
rat-a-tat-tating all afternoon, probably running their fucking AIR
CONDITIONER, why the FUCK are they out in the DESERT.
Chaco was a rather huge town about 1000 years ago. I mean, like 5
story buildings with what were essentially apartments. Stone-paved
walkways, benches, beuatuful views, etc. After a kiloyear (decimal)
all that's left are wrecks (Picture:36K).
Stone-stupid pop-histories declaim, "why did the indians build a
town out in the desert where there's no water! The unsolved
mystery! Etc!" Well any damn idiot can see once you get here, there
is a damned river, and it dried up, mostly. Some mystery.
It was 104 degrees that weekend. HOT! I partook of some shrooms,
drank a gallon (really) of water, and carrying another half-gallon
with me, headed out one of the designated hiking trails. There's
a book you sign as you head out, so they can find you if you get
lost. I signed it, thinking, pah, anyone who'd get stuck out here
is an idiot. Well!
I marched out about two or three miles, and I can tell you, it is
really easy to see how you could fuck up. At 104 degrees, and
essentially zero degrees humidity, the water is *pumped* out of
you. I was out about three hours. Two quarts of water is NOT ENOUGH.
OK so the mushrooms amplified it, but you can feel the water fleeing
your body; you walk or stand in a sort of fog of moisture around
your body. I am not exaggerating.
I mean, I do lots of desert camping, but I'm not much on hiking
out into the wilderness type stuff. I do zero-impact #car camping#
(where zero is any arbitrarily small number). So consider this
"advice", from someone who regularly travels CA/AZ/NV/NM in summer
in my desert-proofed Rambler.
ALBUQUERQUE. What can you
say about a city? I'll skip it. It's kinda sleepy, I wish I could
convince people to move here, then I would follow. It's kinda cool
here. Absolutely *NO ONE* lives in commercial buildings, it would
be a great place to rent or even buy a commercial building and do
stuff. There's a lot of hippies, a reasonable number of punks, and
a pretty together gay community, though most of it is the usual
tired bars and crap, though there's at least one reasonably radical
gay/lez bookstore (whose name I forget, alas).
The very first time I drove into town, in February 91, having
skipped in in previous trips, I got out of my car on the main drag
whatever it is called, and as soon as I stepped out a pickup with
boneheads in it yelled "fag!". Oh well.
There is some sort of "nuclear museum" in the Air Force base, which
happens to be right in the city(!), that sounds really, really,
*sick*. I must see it one day.
SANTA FAKE. The population
just (1992) reached 50% white, and the locals are quite upset. It
doesn't help that most of the influx are yup-scum fleeing cities,
and importing their overpowering cultural baggage. ("Imperialism"
is the only word that works, but it's so cumbersome.) SF requires
all new construction to conform to this made-up adobe look. It's
bloody *awful*. I mean, the real thing is cool, it's an architecture
and construction method tuned to the local environment, but when
it's four stories of concrete-block based shopping malls, all
painted reddish beige, it's kinda scary. Block after block after
block of it! Lots of little shoppes everywhere. The downtown square
is totally lost, with only a Woolworths and bored teenagers holding
down any resistance.
TAOS. Skip it! Newage runs in the
streets, and noone seems to mind. White Light Nazis set the tone
here. Luckily the Taos Hum, like the tiny roar from Whoville, is
maybe a sign that the local terrain itself is starting to rebel.
When I was a kid, in 1970, our entire family went on a two-week
camping trip, Grand Canyon and all that. We stayed in a KOA Kampground
on the (then) outskirts of town. I remember the wide open view to
the mountains, and the giant anthills all over. 15 years later, I
locate that same KOA, now solidly within the commercial strip, and
become a $22/night RV pit of hell.
Just south of Taos is an amazing place, I wish I could recall the
name... it's a deep gorge along the Rio Grande. It's a little bit
dumpy, looks like a local drinking spot as well as family picnic
area, but it's a great place to camp for free. Deep rocky canyon,
and some great ruins (this or last century) to park in.
LOS ALAMOS -- sick, sick,
sick! What a cool awful place! Erika hates it, but I'm fascinated.
It looks like a town from a PK Dick novel, where the world was
overrun by a military coup, long ago and no one talks about it,
and everyone is forced to take thorazine all the time. Plain block
buildings, beige, beige, beige, military coded signs, hidden watch
stations, giant tanks along the road marked DANGER: CHLORINE. Far
too many churches. The mini-malls have the cheap, shabby 60's look,
and everything looks sort of abandoned. The McDonalds is rumored
to sit on the "hottest" (radiation-wise) commercial site in the
US. I always make sure I eat there! They have a giant suicide rate
amongst the kids, and a high-pressure school system.
Amidst all this is the irritable and inimitable Ed Grothus. Ed used
to work in the labs here years ago, but instead of turning him into
a pod-person, he came to become quite opposed to the technologies
developed here, through first-hand knowledge, and has since become
quite a thorn in the side of the locals, who are constantly trying
to pressure him and his lab-surplus LOS ALAMOS SALES COMPANY out
of existence. It won't work. I dream about this place when I'm not
there, and visit every time I'm in New Mexico. Ed has some
particularly choice goodies he's collected over the years that he
wants to feature in a nuclear age museum in town. Needless to say
he doesn't get any support locally. If you're in the area, absolutely
set aside time to drop in and chat and buy some goodies.
Ed recently renamed the place THE BLACK HOLE, as it seems to have
sucked into it a lot of lab history (and a pun on the fact that
sometimes Ed won't part with the occasional choice goody; more than
once when I've brought something up to buy, Ed grabs it saying "oh
no, that's gotta go in the museum...") Here's a shot of front of the store that's not scratches
on the photo, but April sleet (7000 foot altitude); a closer view
of the Black Hole sign over the door
(the artist also did some amazing artwork that's inside the store;
due to technical errors the photos didn't come out). Here's me in front of some stuff awaiting pickup
outside the store.
LAS VEGAS Route 25, 70 mi. E
of Santa Fe. A peculiar place. It was the center of the West's
commerce for a while, being a giant rail center where they took
herds of walking hamburgers to load on trains to the Least Coast.
Then that went away, and Las Vegas shrivelled up. That happened
around the turn of this century. There's now abandoned buildings
next to City Hall. Hmm.
I wish it wasn't so hateful, cuz it's a kinda cool scary town.
(Note along the way; during the Gulf Oil War, the local repeater
of the university radio, with NPR and other collegie anti-war bent
stuff, went silent. A tech goes up on the roof to fix it, to be
met by some locals with a shotgun saying "stop broadcasting that
commie shit". Oh well.)
This upper-right quadrant of NM is kinda depressed. There's Mora
up Rt. 518 into the mountains, it's really scary, just all the
money sucked out.
ESPANOLA is about 25 mi. N or
Santa Fake. It's a big cholo culture town. Wow! Low riders! Cool
tatoos! What a neat place! Kinda tacky, sprawling town, looks like
some are trying to make it a "bedroom community" (fucking yuck)
for the white yups. A little vandalism goes a long way towards
solving that!
KIM CARSON NATIONAL
FOREST, well on the map it's called "Kit Carson", but this
is much better. North and slightly east, a pretty nice foresty
place to drive through and camp. This is the area through which a
lot of W.S. Burroughs' more recent sexy novels take place.
(Future expansion: Rt 54 N of Alamagordo (carizozo, 3 rivers))
VALLEY OF FIRES, on Rt
380, from S. of Socorro (Rt 25) and Carizzozo (Rt 54). This runs
a long the top of the WHITE SANDS MISSILE BASE, so you get to
witness a bunch of wierd dogfights, etc. Then you pass through the
Valley of Fires (not the one in NV near that other Las Vegas),
which is some amazingly recent (geologically speaking) volcano type
action. It looks like big turds, which I've only seen elsewhere in
pictures of Hawaii. Absolutely amazing plants, cactuses, etc,
completely untouched because no one can figure out a way to get in
there to fuck shit up, what for all the jumble of boulders. There's
a campground I did not stay in but looks great. PS: there's lots
of motorcycle cruiser types, typically afflicted with that
motorcycle-store bad sense of color. Route 385 (admittedly a
beautiful driving road) must appear on run guides or something.
TRINITY SITE is a story unto
itself. One day at work, Edgar asks, "I wonder when the Trinity
site is open to the public?", the Trinity Site, in case you didn't
know, is where the first nuke-ya-ler explosion took place, on what's
now the White Sands Missile Base, in southern New Mexico, in 1945
or something.
It was common lore that the Trinity site is opened once a year to
civilian visitors, the site is well within a quite-active military
test range, though facts about it were a little rare. So I called
Erika and Scot in SANTA FAKE; Scot found
through some mystical method, that in fact, the annual opening was
in two weeks, on October first! And lo, Southwest Airlines was
having a two-for-one sale!
So we immediately planned our trip. Edgar and I were definitely
going, and my boyfriend Josh and my roommate Dina wanted in. At
the last minute, Josh couldn't get time off from work, so Fish, a
friend of ours decided to be "Josh" for Southwest Airline type
purposes.
I felt almost guilty flying to NM. it just seems wrong to not drive
the 1500 miles. Rather than my usual relaxed ritualistic trip, it
was rush, hurry, pack too much shit, take too many clothes,
complicated sort of trip. Nothing to do about that though, due to
the scheduling hell.
We stayed at Scot and Erika's in Santa Fake. On Friday, September
30, Edgar and I went to Los Alamos Sales(link), run by Ed Grothus.
Ed's been collecting LANL equipment, parts, tools and other nuclear
surplus fallout for 20 years. Ed's real cool, a slightly crusty
smart and smart-ass anti-nuke, living in the middle of nuclear
fantasy land itself. Hence his crustyness. Dina and Fish went to
a hotsprings in Jemez Springs area, but I wanted to crawl around
dusty old junk for six hours instead. (It's slightly scary and
depressin when standard boy/girl pops up -- or is it coincidence?)
I know that Edgar and I made the right decision.
Saturday morning we got up and some unreasonable hour, had
grease'n'eggs at some chain restaraunt, and headed south down 25
in our rented Furd Escort. It's about 150 miles down to San Antonio.
Now, Erika and Scot had done this trip some years back, but details
were lost in a neuronic fog of tangled memories. We didn't really
know where the Trinity site was. Scot recalled a plywood sign with
spraypaint on it out on route 380, east of San Antonio, so that's
where we headed. Well, as we passed the giant, fading white WHITE
SANDS MISSILE BASE sign, there's one of those tiny roadside markers
that said ("trinity site") on it. As we slowed down, we noticed
just a few too many cars on a tiny road south. (More than a car
every 20 minutes on 380 is too many.) So we headed south, as it
turns out, into the missile base. A few miles in was a woman at a
guardpost handing out xeroxed brochures about White Sands Missile
Base (!?). We ask, "umm, is the Trinity Site this way?" Yes, she
says, seven miles further on.
We passed some lovely scenery in the
desert surrounding the missile base. The natural beauty is only
surpassed by the architecture and road side attractions. (A "history" of
the project intimated how the scientists and staff working at the
Trinity site during the final stages hunted the antelope herds with
machine guns, and how during WWII fighter plane training, the
trainees we told to fire upon antelope and whatever to sharpen
their skills.)
We finally reached the site, easily found since the road was blocked
off with some guy with a gun and a non-yuppie Bronco-thing with a
flashing blue light, directing the traffic (such as it was) into
the dirt parking lot. I foolishly did not take pictures of the
reception area -- you have to recall, this is a missile base, not
a national park -- a few dozen LARGE white and black men (humans
chosen for sheer bulk are always either black, or white) in standard
fag-bar camo and stomping boots and all carrying .45's (unlike in
bars; too bad). Big sweaty refrigerator-men. And not really liking
us weirdos from the looks of it. Throughout our visit, the looks
we got from the "staff" were an inscrutable mixture of curiosity,
fear and hatred, so rarely seen near cities; we all need this
occasional reminder that standard-issue military and general-purpose
religious baggage and guilt still has a purpose -- to keep in check
the behavior of otherwise utterly uncivilized humans.)
In the dirt parking lot were the usual array of winnebagos and
winnebago people. The Trinity site itself is shaped like a mushroom
cloud. I am not kidding. Startin from the big parking lot, there's
a 200 yard/meter long, 10 yard wide path (stem of the 'shroom) that
leads up to the large circular area, about 400 yards/meters in
diameter that contains the original ground-zero, the monument, and
the stations of the cross and the diorama (see below). Back in
the parking lot are three portable curio-shoppes and a hotdog stand.
I bought Josh a t-shirt that has a mushroom cloud on the front with
the legend TRINITY SITE, 1945 on the front, and a picture of the
monument on the back with the same legend. Cheap polyester of
course! The other shoppe was a Parks Dep't type setup with little
booklets and such, mostly dull, though I really regret not buying
a booklet published by some of the wives of the Los Alamos staff
who lived up on the filthy mesa (beautiful before they moved there)
and went slowly nuts while their husbands made a big toxic bomb.
Right at the entrance to the site itself is "Jumbo", an 8-inch thick cast steel container
designed to hold the proto-bomb, to recover the plutonium -- the
entire world's supply at the time -- in case the bomb failed to
work. By the time they got around to blowing it up, they were
confident that it would work and abandoned Jumbo. (The Army later
blew it up, apparently for no good reason, years later. The place
seems to be filled with places and objects blown up for no really
good reason. Really. To be honest, if I worked there, and could
design projects that gave me access to high explosives and could
occasionally blow things up for fun, assuming I made up a good
excuse, I most certainly would do that. Wouldn't you?)
Our trip begins! What fun! A sign
indicating the start of the family fun area. Here we are behind
some other tourista's walking down the path
towards the Trinity Site. You can't see us, because we're behind
the camera held by myself, me. Edgar, Dina and Fish are behind me,
also not shown.
Just before you enter the fenced-in Ground Zero area, you're greeted
with this sign. Either makeup makes the
big Army guys nervous, or else it's so you won't attach radioactive
dust to your skin with sticky stuff. REMOVAL OF TRINITITE IS
PROHIBITED -- yeah right. If you can find any left. To the right
here, where you can't see, is some local volunteer nuclear apologist
woman, with a geiger counter and a bunch of stuff like a radium
watch, potassium salt ("salt substitute") some mil-surplus junk,
and some trinitite. Click, click, click. DAMN FOOL I am, I forgot
to note the actual background radiation level with the geiger
counter, nor that of the trinitite, though it was essentially the
same as the background.
OK here's the monument. Boring. Next.
Here's the famous remaining-leg of the 100
foot tower that held the bombe. This is where I found my piece
of green trinitite, mixed in with all the bunny poops, which are
brown. A interesting factoid for you: in 1945, the entire on-site
scientific crew walked all over ground-zero the morning after the
plutonium explosion, including the arch-piggy Oppenheimer; this
leads me to believe they really didn't think it was all that
dangerous at that time. There's a picture of some bunch of them
standing at this last-remaining artifact post-boom.
Another shot (that's a joke) of the boring
monument. The circular containing fence, is about 30 yards/meters
beyond the monument. All of ground zero, out to some unknown-to-me
radius, was burned clean of organic matter, and fused into the
crappy green glass they later named "trinitite". It's just
low-grade, bubbly glass with sand stuck to the bottom. We were
told they bulldozed the entire surface and buried it on the site,
some years back.
Along the back fence (the top of the "mushroom cloud") the Army
guys cable-tied a bunch of pitchers glued onto plywood. I called
this exhibit the Stations of the Cross,
just like the Catholic thing, some dozen "stations" where you're
supposed to pray or something. Most of the pictures are the ones
you'd see if you'd bother to read the histories done by the LANL
people. Here's another photo, standing at the Stations looking back towards the entrance.
Here's a look inside the "diorama",
which is really a big wooden box with a glass front, sitting on
the ground, showing what the "original" surface, post-explosion,
looked like. Unfortunately it was built *after* they bulldozed it
all, so the value of this is somewhat obscure to me, though there
is a fair amount of trinitite sitting in little puddles. Maybe this
is really interesting to look at if you get to blow lots of things
up, like laughing at the frog-guts after you blew one up with an
M-80. (The terrible photo was taken through the glass front in
daylight, with flash.)
I forgot to mention, you also get to visit the McDonald ranch,
so-called. Back in the parking lot are these behemoth diesel busses
shuttling people from the parking lot to the ranch. The ranch is
where they actually assembled the bomb, sometime before having
kicked out the actual owner ("McDonald" one would presume.) No
further word from him during the tour. Unfortunately, my cheap-shit
Walgreen's camera started acting up so all only got a few lousy
pictures. I'm a terrible photographer anyways. Here's the welcome sign, with Fish (left) and Dina
in front.
The ranch house was actually quite beautiful; it was built by a
German immigrant at the turn of the century. Adobe and plastered
walls; low windows, great design, plain wood and amazing view of
the plains, called by the locals "Jornada del Muerto, aka Journey
of Death, since there's almost no water. They assembled the plutonium
core in the front room here; when the bomb went off, it blew all
the windows out. Sigh, now boys...
The usual boring dioramas and such setup inside. I fucked up the
photo of this amazing White Sands Missile Range painting, of a pair of fatherly, loving
hands launching a leaping hot'n'hard missile. Also not pictured
(aargh) is a reproduction of the original logo/badge assigned to
all of the military personel on the project -- basically, its a
pinkish brain in the shape of a mushroom cloud; the brain stem/spinal
cord is a lightening bolt, which at the bottom is splitting an atom
rendered as your standard grade-school three atoms circling a
nucleus.
Dear Tom,
(Genuine New Mexico line noise; really! Modem to local Delphi node
dropped.)Website contents, unless otherwise specified, © 2023 by
Tom Jennings is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
