Framedlight

  Despite the dust we had a good night at the Comfort Inn, and were very pleased to have been in the warm when we saw that the van was covered with frost and icicles were dripping from the trees. We went back to the J Robert Oppenheimer house as it had not been open to the public the day before. It is quite a large house and contains a museum dedicated to Oppenheimer's life. When Oppenheimer heard the explosion at the Trinity test site he later said that the words from the Bhagavad Gita came to him "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds". After the war Oppenheimer became the chairman of the US Atomic Energy Commission and used that position to lobby against nuclear proliferation and the development of the hydrogen bomb. In 1954, during the McCarthy era, Oppenheimer's security clearance was stripped from him. His politics had always been left leaning but he had never spied for the USSR as was confirmed by the Russians themselves. President Kennedy awarded him ...

We drove the camper with the heating in the cab blasting out, on the road through to Los Alamos. This passes through the Valles Caldera, a beautiful stretch of high plateau which was formed when a volcano erupted around 1.25 million years ago. The area is  a supervolcano like Yellowstone and it last erupted around 130,000 years ago. It still however produces hot springs and fumaroles. The highest peak overlooking it is the Redondo Peak at 11,253ft  but the main valley is still over 8,000 ft. It looks cold in the pictures and it was freezing and rather bleak. We drove up to the visitor centre which was open but there were few places to walk and a back country road that you can use to drive right through the centre of the Park was shut for the winter. There was still evidence of fire damage from huge fires that occurred in 2011 and 2013. They now operate prescribed burns. We drove on to Los Alamos and were amused when we were stopped on the main road at a sentry box by an office...