Trinity Site

This is by and far the post restrictive post I've ever done, but I feel it is necessary to pay homage to this awesome nook of New Mexico. Twice a year, White Sands Missile Range opens its barbed wire gates and allows guest into the super-large testing site to see the Trinity Site. The site is confusing if you don't understand it, because you're driving for about an hour through miles upon miles of vast open desert, to find another several sections of barbed wire, then barbed wire fencing within the other fencing and you feel like you're in an outtake of "The X Files" before you realize there's a big old RADIOACTIVE sign every time you turn your head. You've reached your destination. Park the car, just don't roll around in the rocks or do something stupid. The Trinity Site is ground zero where on July 16, 1945, about a month before the rest of the world witnessed the power, the Army tested a nuclear weapon. Now it's a desert that's fenced in with a lava obelisk off center where in 1945 a 100 foot wooden tower stood and the bomb dropped marking the birth site of the Atomic Age. Around the perimeter there is information about the bomb and the personnel that worked on it from scientists in white lab coats to guys in fatigues. It might not sound like much, but it's an unbelievable collection of power that remains to be controversial. About a mile from that site is the "Lab" that was a usurped farm house where they completed the process of making the bomb and gingerly brought it the mile or so down the road. Going in there is like going back in time. The house was rebuilt, but wall paper from salvaged bits of wall are hanging along with pictures of the original family and World War II era GIs enjoying downtime that complicated summer. To understand what those GIs were going through is difficult but necessary for the complete experience. The war in Europe has essentially ended and was a humanitarian mission of sorts and their uniform bearing brothers in the Pacific were fighting a tough enemy. As for the men on the ranch, they were pulled out of essentially daily life and placed on this ranch for assistance. To put the level of secrecy in this whole operation into a picture, if a child was born to one of these GIs wives, that child has a birth certificate that they were born at a PO Box in New Mexico. Talk about uniquely identifiable information. Their "clean room" simply has a reminder to wipe feet before entering. Today you scrub under nails for access to a clean room. They swam in a water resiviore and played polo in an area that was soon to become (and today remains) highly radioactive. Difficult to get to, pretty much. Dangerous to your health, not at all (the radiation you're exposed to is the same as if you were on a flight from New York to California). A lot of sand, yep, but that sand saw the birth of a new era and the sand at Wildwood (NJ) can't say that.