Shallow Thoughts : tags : history

Trinity Site

Last year in April, Dave and I finally got around to driving down for Trinity Site day.

Trinity Site is where the Manhattan Project scientists detonated the first prototype for the "Fat Man" plutonium atomic bomb that would eventually be dropped on Nagasaki.

Trinity Site is technically part of the National Park Service, but it's located on White Sands Missile Range and therefore is closed to the public most of the time. They open it two days a year, usually the first Saturday in April and the third Saturday in October — except that this year's April opening was canceled for unspecified reasons, and apparently they're going to cancel the April opening, leaving only October. This year it's October 21.

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Y is for Yunque

Dave was browsing through satellite imagery and noticed what looked like an old bridge across the Rio Grande just north of Española, near the Ohkay Owingeh pueblo.

In the Days of COVID, one cure for the stir-crazies is to get in the car and go for a drive. So we ventured forth to check out this bridge.

Sure enough, just west of where County Road 56A crosses the Rio, there's a little stub of a dead-end road called Yunque that leads to a footbridge.

The name Yunque sounded vaguely familiar, but neither of us could pin down why.

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