This is the third park unit right near Los Alamos, the others being the last two visits at Bandelier and Valles Caldera. There are Los Alamos National Labs units all around the area, and I was even stopped at a security checkpoint when Tesla’s navigation misdirected me (not the first time). I stayed in the neighboring town of Española, and there’s a Native American community right next door too. I got a bit of culture shock again seeing how different lives are between communities that are so close to each other physically.

Los Alamos is very strange. First, according to a local, most of the science workers are introverts and the other workers spend the weekends in Santa Fe nearby. So the town has all these big shopping plazas with a variety of (often Asian) restaurants, but they’re all virtually empty on weekends. The place is beautifully landscaped with flowering trees, manicured lawns, pristine sidewalks and a lovely park next to the visitor centers. If it weren’t so American, I would suspect it of being a Potemkin village. There are actually two small visitor centers practically right next door to each other, one for the park service and one for the town, so I visited both. They both recommended the exact same attractions in the same helpful and enthusiastic, smiling way with almost identical maps.

Also strangely, although it was atomic scientists who invented the atomic clock as a way to standardize time across all different clocks, the Bradbury Science Museum mobile website ironically doesn’t display its hours of operation (they said they would fix that). They have an incredible amount of information, but they won’t tell visitors when they’re open. Now that my trip is over, I can see the hours on my desktop computer: Tues-Sat 10am to 5pm and Sun 1 to 5pm. And while the museum had an exhibit on wildfires and an exhibit on climate change, they almost seemed to be avoiding making a connection between the two. The climate exhibit was all about Arctic research, implying that climate change was going on there, but the wildfire exhibit was about fire safety, implying that fires were simply natural and avoidable events. As I write this, the Cerro Pelado fire is six miles from the Lab and is over 20,000 acres, so they might want to reprioritize how they assess the threat of climate change.

And finally, I’m going to break my own rule and add a second picture. Dr Oppenheimer and several of the other top scientists lived in converted scouts’ cabins after the government confiscated an elite boys camp to build nuclear weapons. In his neighbor’s cabin, next to the kitchen, is a realistic display of a miniature version created in the 1980’s: the scariest thing I’ve seen besides the climate crisis, a nuclear bomb designed to be carried in a backpack.