Trying to catch up on my postings, but it easy to get behind when you are traveling. Anyway, here are some photos from my trip to Los Alamos and the history museum there. I learned a lot about the background of this place.
First, there are a few tours of the actual Manhattan facility, but they fill up fast, so I had to make do with the small town area next to the military facility. Maybe on another trip I will make reservations months in advance. However, there is still a lot of history in the town itself.
First, there is really no place to stay in Los Alamos, so I was "camping" at the nearby White Rock visitor center. It is basically just a parking lot with electric hookups and an available water fill and dump station, but I did not take any photos of it. The photos below are of the short drive into Los Alamos.
When they were looking for an out-of-the-way place to build the top-secret facility for scientists to develop the atomic bomb, they chose this place because there was not much around. Plus, there were several steep ridges that were hard to get to and easily defended. Below is the old guardhouse. It is not used as a guardhouse any more, but there is a much more serious guardhouse and entrance to the part of the area which is still owned and managed by the military as a research facility. That is where the tour that I was not able to take goes!! The town is open to all.
Apparently, there is not any current news from Mars because this TV monitor on the main street was not turned on.
One thing that attracted them to this area was that there was an existing boy's school with buildings they could use. So, they forced the school to close and took over this main building along with several outbuildings for offices and labs.
Hanging around on the corner were these bronzes of Dr. Robert Oppenheimer and General Leslie Groves, who managed the project.
Sorry for the image of the tree, but there was just no way to take a better photo of this.
This is the impressive rear entrance to the original boy's school. Reminds me a bit of the buildings at Yellowstone.
The dining hall.
The main part of the museum was in the next door guest cottage.
And some photos of the inside of the museum.
And some of the original ancestral buildings on the property.
Heading back to the town of White Rock. Beautiful area for a secret facility!
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