October 2022 Places
Trinity Site: White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico 505-678-1134
The National Atomic Museum Albuquerque, New Mexico
Twice a year the pilgrims come, thousands of them, to the remote New Mexican desert that early Spanish settlers called La Jornada del Muerto—The Journey of the Dead. Long caravans of cars snake across the land where hunger, thirst, and Apaches were once killed without mercy. There's a solemnity to the procession as if the desert were enforcing its own silence and gravity upon the travelers. All are drawn to one of the most haunting places on Earth, where more than a half-century ago an elite group of scientists working on the top-secret Manhattan Project unleashed a weapon that melted more than three square miles of desert sand into barren glass.
