White Sands Missile Range

There's a traffic jam out here in the middle of nowhere, a long line of cars stretching up a two-lane desert road and on over the crest of a low hill. At the head of the line, several uniformed men with guns guard a closed arm gate, and they have us feeling as restless as shoppers outside a department store the morning after Thanksgiving. We aren't here for the sales, though. We want to see the place of secrets.

Game managers were simply looking for a good trophy animal to improve the hunting in this empty quarter of southern New Mexico. What they got, it turns out 30 years later, was a desert antelope with a talent for breeding that would make a rabbit blush. The oryx, a native of Africa's Kalahari Desert, has taken to the Chihuahuan desert at White Sands Missile Range as if it were home turf.

White Sands Missile Range will be the secondary landing site for the space shuttle this fall because of runway repairs at Edwards Air Force Base in California. White Sands Space Harbor will become the backup site for three months, said Nicole Cloutier, a spokeswoman at Johnson Space Flight Center in Houston. But the possibility of a White Sands landing is remote based on the current shuttle schedule.

For over three decades, cattle ranchers near this high desert hamlet have evacuated their homes whenever rocket testing was under way at White Sands Missile Range. Few groused about the daylong dislocations because the Army paid up to tens of thousands of dollars annually for the disruption and anxiety of abandoning homes and livestock while experimental weapons slammed down onto the missile range a few miles away.

The Trinity Site, on the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, lies on a stretch of desert that the Spanish explorers called jornada del muerto, "route of the dead man." It is a faint crater of scruffy grass that one would never notice except for the two concentric fences enclosing it. On July 16, 1945, when the first atomic bomb was exploded here, a fireball vaporized the tower that held it and fused the sandy soil beneath it.

After a half-century of disappointment and delay, a band of Southern California treasure hunters has launched a high-tech search for a hoard of gold they believe lies deep beneath a fissured limestone ridge on the White Sands Missile Range. With the help of ground radar, a miniature television camera and a global satellite positioning system, descendants of the late M. E.

Driving across the Southwestern desert to stand at the ground-zero point of an atomic explosion sounds like a strange way to spend a Saturday. But twice each year, several thousand people do just that in a pilgrimage to Trinity Site in the New Mexico desert northwest of Alamogordo.