Return to Los Alamos

Tuesday would be a rest day, so Sally went to get her hair done, we cleaned and did the laundry! Surprisingly we awoke to the sound of rain - only the second time on this trip and it lasted about half an hour. However it was enough to put snow back onto the mountain tops and by the evening the Rio Grande had swollen to at least twice the size of the previous day.
I had picked up on the Internet that there would be a meeting of the Los Alamos Historical Society tonight. They had the historian from Y12 Building at Oak Ridge TN, D Ray Smith coming to talk about the other Secret City: Oak Ridge. Sally and I had visited Oak Ridge in October of 2009 when we stayed at Raccoon Valley, with George and Kay.
It was a fascinating evening, about 100 people turned up, as Los Alamos is very proud of its short but dramatic history. There were many in the audience who had worked on the Manhattan Project, either at Oak Ridge, Los Alamos or Hanford. We listened as Ray Smith talked about the Oak Ridge site, the buildings, what happened there and what its future is. Oak Ridge was where all of USA's weapons grade uranium and plutonium were refined using massive cyclotrons call Calutrons. They were constructed during, or soon after, the war. However no weapons grade materials have been produced since 1964 and although the site was used to recycle fission material from all over the world its role is now diminishing and much of it will be demolished.
I also found time before the meeting to drive up into the mountain above Los Alamos to see the Valle Caldera, which is the third largest Caldera in the world (so the visitor center says, not sure myself). The view from the edge was quite spectacular, as were the views back across the Rio Grande Valley.