I didn’t post about it at the time, but J and I took a trip to Utah at the end of March. We hung out in Logan, UT for a bit. It was my first time in northern Utah, so we took the scenic drive back from Salt Lake. There was a delicious lunch at the Red Iguana (amazing mole sauce), a walk top of the salt lake city library (pretty cool building that has a curved ramp built up to roof garden), and a brief visit to the olympic park where we saw some bobsledders practice at close range (being a bobsledder looks both fast and bumpy). In Logan we went cross-country skiing, ate some food with fry sauce, took a hike in the canyon, forgot to play ping pong, inspected Mormon temples from afar, frequented hot springs, and made yam tacos. Finally we left Utah and then flew south to Vegas. First to hang out in Red Rock Canyon, see E, R, and some other peeps on their climbing trip, and second to rendezvous with B.

Vegas plans included a tour at the atomic testing site and an excursion to a tiny town south of Death Valley called Tecopa, where we swam in pristine natural hot springs. You can’t bring cameras (or cell phones, even) on the tour due to ‘classified information/security concerns’, but you do get to see a lot of artifacts of the program. Initially testing was done above ground, and countless structures were built to measure the effects that an atomic blast and the subsequent radiation would have on infrastructure and buildings. Bomb shelters were tested, as well as elevated railroad tracks, bank vaults, houses, bunkers, and quite frequently, soldiers and manequins. It was impressive to see the I-beams for the elevated rail bent into a huge arc above our heads. The wider beams (although incredibly thick)were dramatically bowed, unlike the narrower beams, some of which were still perfectly straight. It’s all about surface area facing the blast, apparently.

The things that stood out most for me were the incredible size of the site (860,000 acres, roughly), the fact that it was still litered with decades worth of artifacts (you could drive for miles and see a tower or a crater from a nuclear blast), and the general drabness of the facilities. Lots of ‘teamwork’ posters and comment boxes for reporting unsafe procedures, invariably branded with a corporate logo from some military-industrial consulting organization. It felt like a totally different world.

Without further ado, some pictures: