Los Alamos & Hernandez
18 March 2024
Los Alamos lies 18 miles off the main north-south Route 84. Vistas too numerous to photograph jump out. Snowy peaks on one side and multi-coloured rock formations that resemble melting ice cream on the other vie for attention. But it’s the fast, winding road that demands it.
Considering it’s the cradle of the most destructive technology devised by man, Los Alamos is peaceful and well preserved, but without being twee. The visitor centre has two staff on duty who are going through patient explanations for the ten-thousandth time with ignorant visitors - of which I am one - with the enthusiasm of first-day recruits.
The Trinity Tests did not take place here, they were conducted much further south near Alamogordo which still looks like it’s in the midst of a nuclear winter. Like the majority of New Mexico south of Santa Fe does, for that matter. Los Alamos was where Robert Oppenheimer and his hand-picked crew of physicists and engineers did the hard sums and has a university-town feel to it.
It’s is quiet too, which given the hoopla over the recent film is a bit surprising. But it’s a Monday morning and very cold despite the blue skies. Given the history, it is perhaps unsurprising there are no Japanese tourists in evidence who can usually be relied on to swell visitor numbers.
I’m recommended a 45-minute walking tour that includes many of the original buildings where the work was carried out. I’m given a map to follow. Bathtub Row, where the principal scientists, including Oppenheimer, had their lodges is the most poignant. Modest houses for people with little to be modest about, the street has its name as these were the only houses constructed for the Manhattan Project that had baths… Elsewhere, small timber houses built for other workers are still there, now housing modern workers.
Back on Route 84, I stop again near the clapped-out town of Hernandez.
Late in the afternoon on 01 November 1941, a commercial photographer was driving south towards Encina when he noticed an extraordinary scene emerging. The moon was rising in the east against a sky of solid black above a series of snow-covered mountains. The setting sun had gilded a collection of modest dwellings, alongside a church and a cross-filled graveyard. With a single exposure, Ansel Adams then captured one of photography’s defining moments that retains its haunting, mystifying power to this day.
A dedicated soul with time on his hands has devoted himself to determining the exact time, date and lat-long coordinates from where the photograph was taken and posted it online. The image below is taken from that very spot, in the middle of the car park for the San Jose cemetery. The drastically remodelled freeway now obscures the buildings and the now mature trees, but the graveyard is still visible from the other side of US84.
It was still a little bit thrilling to stand in the same spot that generated an image that encouraged me to pick up a camera in the first place, and partially explains why I don’t much like photos with people in them…
To see the original, you’ll need to Google ‘Moonrise - Hernandez, New Mexico’ as I daren’t post it here. It’s one of the most fiercely protected copyrights in the photographic world as well as being amongst the most valuable prints. A 1948 print sold at auction for $71,500 in 1971. The same print then fetched $609,600 in 2006 and most recently $884,900 in 2022 at Sotheby’s.
After a quick stop at Georgia O’Keefe’s Ghost Ranch to gawp at yet more rock formations, the road climbs into the foothills of the Rockies. Snow is piled by the side of the road after the storm the week before. The roads are in perfect condition and the air, dry and clean as I cross into Colorado.
After yesterday's challenges, with weather and an unnerving motel, it feels good to have one, swift day of riding under my belt. The Days Inn at the end of it, in the sleepy town of Alamosa, is everything I want in a motel: clean, convenient and silent. There are even a few places open in town for dinner, despite it being a Monday.
