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White Sands probably has more fascinating history, that most will never hear of, than any place other than Area 51. It started as a WWII bombing and gunnery range, then Trinity, then the V-2 and "our" Nazis beginning our rocket program, all the way to the present.

Some of my favorite "what in the heck" WSMR areas from Google Maps:

Johnny Horton would know this one

Thought this was an airstrip but I don't think it is

Rocket Sled track?

Space shuttle runway? Must be 5-6 miles long

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Just seeing this thread for the first time. I was stationed out there on WSMR for 3 years and worked on the Sled Track listed above (hit Mach 10), the "airstrip" listed above (which is not an airstrip), and many other interesting places out there. Fun assignment working mostly in the dark at night running into huge oryx in our HUMMERs.

Next Open House is October 6, 2018.

Updated Trinity web site:

http://www.wsmr.army.mil/Trinity/Pages/Home.aspx

Canyon have you read Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Dark Sun? You've immersed yourself quite a bit it atomic history so they may not be as enlightening to you as they were to me but I highly, highly recommend both. I haven't read them in several years but I recently pulled Dark Sun out of the bookcase to read again in the near future as I recently listened to Dan Carlin's podcast on the nuclear arms race.

Making, yes. It's one of the best and most comprehensive. Haven't read Dark Sun. Will have to scan my library and remind myself what other Manhattan Project books I've read.

Very cool. Thx for the report. If you get back to southern nm/az, the titan missile museum is well worth a stop also.

April 6, 2019 Open House bump

A bump for this article I just ran across. A guy is selling trinitite at this web site

https://www.atomicrockshop.com/index.html

At that site, he links the absolutely insane story of a guy who collected trinitite from the Trinity Site in the early 1950s.

http://www.mine-engineer.com/mining/trinity.htm

The april tour is closed this year
Damn covid

We crashed a helicopter out near there during my days in the Navy. An Army CH47 slung the H60 back there, and a Semi loaded it out. I had the chance to fly out there and shut down for the loading operation. I got to talking to the site ranger, and he gave us a private tour. He actually opened one of the boxes, which he said they only did in a blue moon, and let us keep a sample from it. I think I still have it... it looks like the bottom of an old glass 7-up bottle from what I remember. This was back in 1993.

I think the box to which you refer is an enclosure built to show the trinitite on the surface. The box is full of sand, and pretty useless, now.

But you can find tiny trinitite pieces all over the site, as shown in some of the photos here.

Rather than open a new thread, I thought I'd update this one. There is a tour outfit founded by the late Stephen Ambrose.

While the tours are mainly WWII in Europe and Civil War, they do a tour on Manhattan Project history. Next one is scheduled for October 2024, to coincide with the next Trinity Site open house.

https://stephenambrosetours.com/

https://stephenambrosetours.com/tour/manhattan-project/

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DAY 1 Knoxville, TN

Guests fly into Knoxville, Tennessee, and travel independently to our hotel in Oak Ridge, where we gather for an evening welcome reception and dinner. Guests will meet our historian, staff, and each other, and we have the opportunity to engage in our first discussion about the history we will cover in the days ahead.

DAY 2 Knoxville

Here in the hills of East Tennessee, the atomic bomb story begins with the initial developmental stages of what, when deployed, would be a super-atomic nuclear fireball. We will tour sites around the Historic Oak Ridge Community with a local historian stopping at the K-25 History Center, where the staff pioneered gaseous diffusion uranium enrichment technology for the "Little Boy" bomb. At the American Museum of Science and Energy, we become further immersed in the Manhattan project with a two-screen documentary and exhibits that detail the life of this "Secret City." In the late afternoon, we depart Knoxville and fly to Hanford, Washington, where we spend the night.

DAY 3 Richland, WA

Hanford becomes the world's first large-scale center for plutonium production. Here the team built three massive nuclear reactors and used the waters of the scenic Columbia River as coolant. We spend the morning visiting the B-Reactor National Historic Landmark to see the production of plutonium for Trinity, the first detonation device, and subsequent bombs. Hanford became an atomic boomtown, and we see the human side of the project. We tour the Hanford Construction Camp Historic District, Bruggemann's Agricultural Warehouse Complex, the White Bluffs Bank, and Hanford Irrigation District Pump House.

DAY 4 Santa Fe, NM

We take an early morning flight to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where we begin our study of the assembly phase of the Manhattan Project. Driving north to Santa Fe, we stop at Lamy Station, the arrival point for the brain trust that would complete the Manhattan Project. The scientists disembarked their trains here to begin their work at Los Alamos. Just as they did, we proceed to 109 E. Palace Avenue, the check-in office for all arriving personnel. The only difference is that Dorothy Scarritt McKibbin, a vital part of the organization, will not be there to greet us. She became known as the "First Lady of Los Alamos."

DAY 5 Santa Fe, NM

We will start our day with a brief tour of Santa Fe, include the infamous "Spy Sites" in our stops, and continue to Los Alamos. Located on a remote mesa in northern New Mexico, Los Alamos became home to the more than 6,000 scientists and support personnel of the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Here we begin with a visit to the Manhattan Project Historical Landmarks.

DAY 6 Socorro, NM

This morning we have some free time in Old Santa Fe, established by the Spanish in 1610. We will have time to visit shops, take in the architecture, and see Native American arts and crafts. At noon we journey South in preparation for the Trinity Open House at White Sands. First, however, we stop in Albuquerque to visit the Museum of Nuclear Science and History, where the exhibits range from the discovery of nuclear theory to modern advances in nuclear medicine. Here we also see the B-29 Silverplate, the bomber specially designed to carry the bombs "Little Boy" and "Fat Man." We spend the night in Socorro.

DAY 7 Alamogordo, NM

In July 1945, at the Trinity Site, the test detonation sent a multi-colored cloud almost 40,000 feet into the atmosphere while the intense heat fused the sand below into solid glass. Our tour includes the assembly site of the plutonium core at McDonald Ranch House and actual Ground Zero, now marked by a memorial obelisk.

Day 8 El Paso, TX

Today, we will visit White Sands National Park, followed by a guided visit to the White Sands Missile Base Museum before ending the day with our farewell dinner and a congenial sharing of our tour experiences.

DAY 9 Departure

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I've been to all of the above, except Hanford and the White Sands Museum. Looks like a good tour. Were I doing it on my own, I'd add the VLA.

Sounds interesting. Thanks for posting these.

As an aside, although the government's success in the atomic bomb project was astounding, the government, being what it is, couldn't help itself from screwing people in the process. The way it treated the ranchers at White Sands was terrible. (Your mention of the Macdonald ranch house is what triggered this aside.)

How many bases out there, not to mention places like Oak Ridge and Hanford, were taken from landowners "for the duration", 80+ years ago?

Wonder how many farms and ranches were consumed by Fort Hood?

Great questions.

I assume you already know this, but for those who don't, the government didn't simply "take" the ranches that made up White Sands.

It only condemned the small portions of the ranches that the ranchers owned in fee simple, refusing to pay for the value of the ranch as an operating concern (i.e., the fair market value of the ranch).

The government also did not actually condemn the fee simple. It rather only condemned a 10-year lease in the fee simple, and then at the end of each 10 years, condemned another lease. That resulted in the ranchers only getting a tiny pittance from the government. They had not been rich as ranchers (ranching at White Sands is hard), but they made a living. The amounts paid to them by the government forced them into poverty.

I know this because when I first got out of law school, my firm was representing those ranchers and the State of New Mexico in an inverse condemnation action against the government in the US Court of Claims. We won, obtaining a judgment against the government in the multiple billions of dollars.

The government immediately offered us a settlement in which it agreed not to appeal the judgment in return for our agreement to join in a motion to the Court not to publish its decision. The government did not want the decision published because it had done the same as it had at White Sands all over the US during WW II. The only specific location I heard where it had done the same was Fort Hood.

I was googling around the other day and think I came across the published opinion, so the Court may have rejected the joint motion of the parties. I'm not sure. My role in that case as a brand-new baby lawyer was minimal, at most.

CanyonAg77 said:

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How many bases out there, not to mention places like Oak Ridge and Hanford, were taken from landowners "for the duration", 80+ years ago?

Wonder how many farms and ranches were consumed by Fort Hood?

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"The establishment of an Army post, known as "Camp Hood" in 1942, swallowed up 22 area communities and displaced more than 700 families in Bell and Coryell counties."

"Congressman W.R. "Bob" Poage persuaded the War Department to grant grazing rights back to the original owners. The rights are known as Shares. They can be sold or transferred, but are often passed down through families by members of the Central Texas Cattlemen's Association."

Link

Jabin said:

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Sounds interesting. Thanks for posting these.

As an aside, although the government's success in the atomic bomb project was astounding, the government, being what it is, couldn't help itself from screwing people in the process. The way it treated the ranchers at White Sands was terrible. (Your mention of the Macdonald ranch house is what triggered this aside.)

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My grandfather leased land that was taken for the WS missile range, he relocated to Carlsbad and leased land there which was later taken by the government for the national park.