No I don’t have a sunburn.
One of the non sequiturs about being here at Bandelier is this. We are surrounded by intense natural beauty and remote geological magesty and right up the road…. As in 10 miles away. Pretty much on the next mesa top over is Los Alamos.
Ring a bell? Oppenheimer lived nearby and noted this area was in ‘splendid isolation.’ He was asked by Lieutenant General Leslie Groves to spearhead a project that is now famous: The Manhattan Project. Thus started a top secret project where scientists were brought to the area: arriving in Santa Fe and then informed that they were going elsewhere but all was secret. The city was literally a secret from 1943 for years. Today, Los Alamos is still site of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and they are still developing weapons vit also are on the cutting edge of a host of other scientific advances: mapping the human genome, polar ice, modeling epidemics, super computing and more.
Fun fact: Los Alamos has the highest concentration of PhD’s per capita in the US. Visiting was eerie. First of all there are mini outposts in the area and all are under high security and there are signs about no drone flying. Coming in from Bandelier you have to pass a security gate where the guard wears a bullet proof vest and asks for ID but Karen notes that they probably already knew who we were and had already scanned our retinas.
We checked out the Manhattan Project monument and the Bradbury museum (an amazing scientific museum) which is the 5th best scientific museum in the US on a par with the Smithsonian.
And we got some geocaches. Of course.
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