Desert shares its atomic secrets

On Saturday morning, I grab free coffee and a pastry in the lobby and hit the road. It's a 45-minute drive to the missile range, most of it along U.S. 380, a two-lane road snaking east across the low swale of the Rio Grande Valley, then up through a mountain pass to the Tularosa Basin. The land is empty and starkly beautiful, a landscape of rust-colored dirt, dusty yellow-green plants and mountains in shifting shades of brown that stretch for miles beneath a washed-blue sky. I'm so mesmerized I miss the sign for the entrance at the Stallion Range Center and have to turn around.

At the gate I run into the backup of cars. The wait doesn't last long, though, and soon we're a caravan of hundreds coursing through emptiness.

The impermanence of the Trinity Site is striking, given its profound role in history. It has a gravel parking lot and portable toilets. At folding tables, people sell hot dogs and breakfast burritos; three or four vendors hawk books, posters and T-shirts and key chains that say, "Trinity Site, Ground Zero." The explosion site itself, which seems a little bigger than a high school running track, is surrounded by chain-link fence. Instead of heading for it, I grab one of the free shuttle buses for the two-mile trip to the George McDonald ranch house, where scientists and engineers assembled and armed what they called "the gadget."

The four-room adobe house has been restored to the way it looked in 1945. It's jarringly unremarkable, more like a bandit's hide-out than a bomb assembly plant. The "clean room," where the bomb was assembled over three days, was the master bedroom. It looks like a tinker's workshop, with a worktable the engineers built out of rough boards. A sign over the door warned visitors -- back then, not now -- to wipe their feet.

Seeing ground zero

Back at the Trinity Site, a name nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer selected from a John Donne poem, I pass through the outer ring of fencing for the quarter-mile walk to the black lava-rock obelisk marking the detonation spot. The land spreads out empty as far as the eye can see, which is of course why they decided to test their theory of an atomic bomb here.

More than 2,000 people usually show up for the open house, and today's crowd is right on target. The demographics are heavily tilted to gray heads, military jackets and National Rifle Assn. patches.