The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition

by Richard Rhodes

A highlight of the summer was a pack trip. It started in Frijoles, a village within sheer, pueblo-carved Cañon de los Frijoles across the Rio Grande from the Sangre de Cristos, and ascended the canyons and mesas of the Pajarito Plateau up to the Valle Grande of the vast Jemez Caldera above 10,000 feet. The Jemez Caldera is a bowl-shaped volcanic crater twelve miles across with a grassy basin inside 3,500 feet below the rim, the basin divided by mountainous extrusions of lava into several high valleys. It is a million years old and one of the largest calderas in the world, visible even from the moon. Northward four miles from the Cañon de los Frijoles a parallel canyon took its Spanish name from the cottonwoods that shaded its washes: Los Alamos. Young Robert Oppenheimer first approached it in the summer of 1922.