I have many, many pictures and a fair amount of video, but there’s no way I’m getting it all posted here, now. I’ll try to get some of it up now.
For now, let me tell you a couple things about Chaco:
The road to Chaco is really crappy. From US550, you get on to CR7900, which is paved, and not too bad… but then you get on CR7950, which accounts for 13 of the 21 miles from US550 to Chaco. CR7950 is a washboarded dirt road. Count on it taking an hour or more to cover those 13 miles.
Dress for Chaco, not Farmington. What does that mean? Chaco is at 6200 feet. It’s windy. You should probably have a windbreaker. A hat might not be a bad choice.
If you’re not camping, plan to see everything in one day. That means get there early. It also means plan on leaving the park 2 hours before sunset so you can get off the dirt road before it’s dark.
Bring some sort of food and beverages. There is nothing there, except, maybe some bottled water in the visitor center and a couple potable water spigots. If you want anything more than that, you’ll have to bring it yourself.
You will be walking a lot in high-altitude conditions. If that sort of thing’s not your bag, baby, skip it.
With all that in mind, Chaco is a really nifty place. It’s out of the way, and not all that easy to get to, but if you can get past that it’s amazing.
I’ll have more pics and video up soon. For now:
The awful road into Chaco
Crossing the wash (part 1)
Crossing the wash (part 2)
Pueblo Del Arroyo walking tour
Pan around the Great Kiva
Thoughts about the Great Kiva (MOV021 - coming shortly)
Well, I got to see the first two sites… The VLA, outside of Socorro, NM (Friday) and the Trinity Site (Saturday). I have some video, but I’m having such trouble getting reliable Internet connectivity, that the uploads will be sparse for now.
Here’s me welcoming me to New Mexico
What I’ve seen so far:
Socorro
Well, Socorro is a quaint little town. About an hour South of Albuquerque, Socorro is not, in itself, much of a tourist attraction. Socorro’s most appealing draw is that it’s within 75 miles of the VLA and White Sands (home of the Trinity Site). Actually, the Stallion Gate of White Sands is only about 30 miles from Socorro. Trinity is another 16-or-so miles from the gate. Socorro is cute, and the people are friendly, from what I saw, but after a couple days, there’s really nothing more to see.
Oh, but there was a McCain Palin rally…
Very Large Array
Very Large doesn’t really do it justice. “Frickin’ Huge” might be more appropriate. The dishes are enormous, and there are 27 of them, split into 3 legs, each of those, miles long. These dishes are all capable of being steered individually, in groups, or all together, to track distant objects and take detailed time-exposures in radio light. The dishes themselves are huge, but they’re dwarfed by the miles of track used to position them. …and, as big as the dishes are, the actual antennas which collect the radio light are no bigger than a pack of cigarettes. It’s really a stupefying thing to see. It’s even more stupefying to consider the weakness of the signals they receive and the minuteness of the constant and complex steering adjustments needed to keep all those dishes, separated by miles, pointed at the same object, hundreds, or thousands, or millions, or even billions of lightyears away. The VLA is a hell of a thing.
Me talking about aiming the dishes… and being a little stupid.
Trinity
The Trinity Site is quite a place. Some 64 years ago, an army of scientists, technicians, and, well, army men worked feverishly to build a workable atomic weapon. Some thought the blast would burn the whole atmosphere off the Earth. They were so unsure of what they were doing that their idea of how much fissile material they would need were only accurate to a factor of 100. They were doing their calculations with slide rules, adding machines, and IBM sorting machines.
On July 16, 1945, they performed the one test they could of the implosion-trigger plutonium bomb design later dropped on Nagasaki, Japan.
Now, there is almost nothing to show for it. There is a fenced-off circular area, at the center, a lava-rock obelisk, with two plaques. For visitor days (two days a year), there are captioned photos attached to the back fence, and an unused bomb casing for the type of device tested at Trinity. There is also a shed preserving the floor of the blast area as it was before it was bulldozed. You can’t see in the shed.
There is no interpretation provided for the visitor. It is up to you to decide whether developing and deploying nuclear weapons was good or bad; necessary or unnecessary.
The desolation of the site and its surroundings lives up to the name Jornada del Muerto.
What’s Next?
I’m in Farmington, NM tonight, and will be visiting Chaco Canyon tomorrow. I’m trying to get some videos uploaded, but it’s very sketchy. When the hotels talk about “high speed Internet access” they’re not really talking about upload speeds. I’ll post again when I can.