Los Alamos, NM

With memories of Roswell still fresh,

we wondered if this portended a UFO invasion.

Los Alamos is densely packed with some of the most ingenious heads on the planet, but the one that stood out the most to us on our recent trip there was

the head of the mule deer we found in our campground.  Truly, it is not often you stumble across a loose head and it brought forth lots of questions.  Like us, though, you will have to wait for the answers.

This trip was so jammed with adventure that I'm slowing down the pace of delivery to single day parcels.

The logistics of this camping trip were more tightly organized and executed than our last trip.  This is progress.  We had a list, we followed it, and before we went to sleep, we had a heap of stuff to pack in the car the next morning. 

Our first stop was at the Los Alamos Historical Museum.  This area is small, but rife with history that impacted the world.  This little museum used to be Los Alamos Ranch School.  It was a private boys' school dedicated to helping boys become 'strong young men through a life of rigorous outdoor living and classical education.'

In 1942, the Ranch School received a letter informing them that the government would be taking it over.  It would accommodate the Manhattan Project.

It is impossible to consider the atomic bomb without emotion, but this -- the history of a community working undercover, silently and together, on a project that would forever impact the world -- is an indisputable and fascinating facet of Los Alamos history.

As people disappeared from 

In 1943, some people at Lockheed began to notice that some other people were no longer showing up for work.  They thought they were just transferred to another department, another part of the building.  Transferred, yes, but this was no ordinary transfer.  Consider receiving an offer, as Harlow Russ notes above, to work at 'an unknown location to do unspecified work for an unknown war project.'  He could not pass up the offer.

This was undercover in the extreme.  Not just one person, but a whole community was undercover in a remote location, far away from their friends, extended family, and their former lives.  The median age was 24.  Twenty-four?  I think of myself at 24 and wonder how that was possible.  It was another time, of course, and most of these young people came with young families.  Kids playing on the dirt roads, evenings of gatherings & skits.  Bound together by their circumstances, they had a tight knit community.  They shared a bond that people who go through something together share.

 Los Alamos evolved from a tiny outpost with a backbone of rugged living and adventure to a larger community with cutting edge science forever a part of their profile.  The Lab itself, in addition to national security, conducts research on space exploration, renewable energy, medicine, nanotechnology, and super-computing.  The Lab surely serves as a reserve for some of the brightest people in the world; thousands of  physicists, engineers, chemists, material scientists, and mathematicians.  

We did our part by giving pedestrians an extra wide berth, figuring that many of them would be busy working on calculations far more complex than how to cross the street safely.

There is a gate outside the Lab which says Visitors Welcome, but when we asked, the guard said it meant we were welcome to drive through the area to the connecting road.  We were, however, welcome to stop at the Bradbury Science Museum.

The museum was densely loaded with information many of the Lab's current projects as well as their more well known history with the atom bomb.  We learned about the IBM Roadrunner super computer at the museum.  It's the world's first petaflop computer, performing 1,000 trillion calculations in a second.  A second? This is beyond fathoming.  In 2008, the machine could perform a physics calculations in a week that 10 years earlier would have taken 20 years to complete.  You have to be fast to stay in the lead, though.  At last read, Titan was the fastest super-computer, performing 17.59 petaflops -- 17.59 x 1000 trillion (quadrillions) of calculations per second.  Of course, you'll need some space to house it.

Much more than our little tents can handle.

And so I promised answers to questions about the stray mule deer head.  It is as you probably expect.  There are no answers.  It seems that someone, inexplicably, had an extra mule deer head and tossed it over the fence to dispose of it.  Truth is stranger than fiction.

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