For lack of a better post title, today was epic. And so unexpected. We got up this morning fairly early because the blinding sun here and our east facing bedrooms can defeat even the strongest resolve to stay in bed. Then I couldn’t figure out how to work the Star Trek shower.
Then there was figuring out how to find a coffee mug in the fully-packed kitchen. Hint: They’re in the antique range at the buffet.
Given our general inability to be humans in the mornings, I’m impressed with how quickly we made it out the door. We were in line to enter the White Sands Missile Range Stallion Gate by about 9:30. It felt odd to be stuck in bumper-to-bumper stop-and-go traffic on a two-lane road in what is quite literally the middle of nowhere in the desert, but we sure did sit there for nearly 45 minutes to get in. But I will absolutely give the Army credit for running a remarkably efficient operation given the number of visitors they were admitting.
Once inside the gates, with dashcams and cellphones unmounted (per orders), radios off (to be safe), and cell service about out of reach (because where the hell are we?), we drove another fifteen miles into the installation to the Trinity Site historic landmark.
The parking area was next to Ground Zero, where the “Gadget” (the codename for the test device), a plutonium implosion device, was detonated from atop a small tower. The world’s first ever nuclear explosion. That style of explosive was later dropped on Nagasaki. The structure that suspended the bomb was vaporized and only a tiny piece of one support leg remains. In its place, an obelisk of lava rocks stands.
The ground is covered with “Trinitite,” a unique glass rock formed by the desert sands melting to form a sandy glass because of the heat of the explosion.
George read from the booklet.
Then he found the gift shop. It was a trailer. I asked him to pick me up a radioactive coffee mug and he got another roadtrip hat.
After exploring Ground Zero, we took a base bus over to the McDonald Ranch nearby. The main ranch house still stands, as well as ruins of a bunk house and reservoir. The main house had several uses, but the master bedroom served as an improvised clean room where the plutonium core of The Gadget was assembled. As three people who work in tech and electronics, we were a little amused that Manhattan Project scientists used tarp to cover the windows and “made sure to dust off their boots” before entering; clean room tech sure has come a long way. Though that, too, may have gotten a start here.
I’m convinced history classes are wasted on children, as I have started to find such material more interesting in the past few years. But I don’t generally need to “stand in the place” where an event happened. This was decidedly different, probably because of the unique landscape and remoteness of the site. What happened here changed the world in the short and long term in incalculable ways. This was a special thing to see, and I’m so glad George convinced us to go.
And with that, what we really came here to do was done. The enormity of what we saw weighed heavily, but in practical terms, there’s not a lot to it. So by about 12:30, we’d seen what remains of the Site and started to think about what to do next. We started the back to the AirBnB via the Quebradas Back Country Byway.
It was a gorgeous road. Easily passable in the Xterra and the Renegade, but in truth, I bet Evan’s Volvo would have been just fine. 4WD useful, but not required. Lots of loose rocky gravel, but the only thing dramatic about it was the view.
After a short break in the house, we headed up to San Lorenzo Canyon. I came across the trail recording on AllTrails and it seemed interesting. And since it was my idea, I got to lead the way! Unfortunately, Google Maps’s suggestion to get to the trailhead ended up being a closed road. How embarrassing… Between the Xterra’s nav and the Caltopo maps in my phone, I thought I had an alternate, but the road I was looking at appeared to no longer exist when we approached the turn-off. Then George came to the rescue with his pile of printed atlases.
And boy did he find a helluva road! It ended up being a dried up, sandy, dusty riverbed for a few miles. It was a lot of fun to play around in. I’m kinda surprised that it was encouraged to drive on it, but it was clearly signed as “the road,” even if it is in no way an actual road. Just the flatest part of the sandy wilderness. Then the rocks on either side grew taller as we entered the edge of the canyon.
As it turns out, the trail recording leaves out a few key details: a lot of this is just bouldering and walking along what look like clearings in a dried up creek. Also, the person who posted the recording originally had no interest in staying on an actual trail. So we spent a while longer than we’d intended to because we got a little lost and then found again, but what we saw along the way was absolutely incredible.
As we packed up to leave, another adventurer, Donna, an older woman traveling solo in a new-to-her early-2000s Subaru Forester pulled up where we’d parked. She spoke with us a while, and it was fun to encounter someone else just wandering around admiring the desert like we were. She began a week-long roadtrip for her birthday, and after facing delays for some personal reasons, she was finally on the road. She actually did Quebradas a little earlier in the day, too.
After speaking with her a little while, the sun had set and it was starting to get dark. So we packed up, turned on our silly offroad lights, and headed back to Socorro for a traditional New Mexican dinner of green chili burgers. Then on to the AirBnB for a nightcap and photo editing under the stars.
