Bandelier National Monument

 

On Monday we drove NW from Santa Fe to Bandelier National  Monument to see the ancestral Pueblo cliff dwellings. We drove  about  fifty miles and climbed gradually eventually reaching nearly 8,000 ft .  The ancestral Pueblo people lived in a canyon at Bandelier about 700 years ago. The entire area is hundreds of feet deep in soft volcanic ash rock from a nearby extinct volcano. The people carved the volcanic rock into bricks to make buildings   that they attached to the canyon wall where there is a cave. We saw the foundations of the buildings and went in some of the rock caves, enjoying the cool day in spite of showers.  It is an amazing place, and we enjoyed seeing it and hearing about it from the rangers there.

Our plan was to visit the Bradbury Science Museum in nearby Los Alamos after visiting  Bandelier. As we were approaching Bandelier we began to see signs for “tech areas.” It soon became apparent that these areas with  buildings were part of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. On one ridge we saw a moderately sized radio telescope antenna that was pointed straight up at the sky. The tech areas were surrounded by barbed wire fences and each had a number.

We had thought that at Los Alamos we would learn all about the building of the first atomic bomb. There was that at the Bradbury Museum, but the big surprise was the vastness of the National Laboratory there and in the surrounding 40 square miles that was originally established to build the  first atomic bomb during WW II. We learned that there is a total of 49 tech areas where various scientific experiments are taking place. We had the feeling that there is no telling what kind of experiments are going on there. When we reached the outskirts of Los Alamos we had to pass through a government guard station.

We learned that one of the main missions of the laboratory is to check nuclear weapons for readiness and reliability without actually testing them. Los Alamos is one facility that still builds nuclear weapons. In addition to defense, the laboratory is working in diverse areas like medicine and the human genome, environmental research, and energy.