by Phil Patton
In time I tried to map, too, the mind-sets of those on the Ridge: “Believe secret airplanes are being tested” on a line with “Believe alien technology is being tested.” The youfers and the Interceptors would be at either pole. In the middle were a surprising number of people who bought into both—and even more who were simply tempted to believe.
The other axis would distinguish “those who think it ought to remain secret” from “those who want it opened as much as possible.” Oddly enough, by the mid-nineties I was hearing the youfers cluster at the first end of the axis, with Huff and Lear saying they now thought it should all remain closed, the whole story kept down because people weren’t ready, couldn’t deal with it.
The closer you got, the harder it was to see. It became a cliché that everyone saw from the Ridge what they wanted to see: “I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t believed it.” To see the whole thing you had to step away, and look from many perspectives, through many eyes.
Still, I studied the mint and mocha shades of the Coast and Geodetic Survey maps and looked at the official tourist map of Nevada, with its upbeat registration of ghost towns. I put my hands on maps from the Defense Mapping Agency as well as the Federal Aviation Administration aerial charts with their landscape of ochers and burnt yellow hatched with the purple edges of restricted military operations areas like blackberry juice stains or old, fading bruises. The signal stations—VORs—for aviation guidance were rendered as gear-toothed compass wheels.
One afternoon I stopped by the state historical museum in Las Vegas. There was a display on the Shoshone tribes who originally lived in the area. Beside a panoramic photograph of Tonopah, the town north of Dreamland proper, in the heyday of the silver boom—a collection of mine tailings and shacks and a hotel bearing a Bull Durham ad—hung a map promoting the Tonopah and Tidewater railroad, the brainchild of Francis “Borax” Smith. Smith replaced the famed twenty-mule teams hauling borax from the mines around Trona with trains, and they still ran. In Mojave I had many times heard the Trona train rumbling through in the middle of the night, a seemingly endless succession of low dark ore cars coming in from the northeast.
The landscape of nearly a hundred years ago looked more inhabited and detailed, packed with mines and claims and crisscrossing railroads. In the map’s legend, the twin T’s of the railroad name were cleverly eye-punned into twin T-rails. I was shocked to see no boundaries across the map—no dotted perimeters, no shaded restricted areas, no overlapping colors—so used had I become to maps of restricted spaces.
I looked at every map I could find. I even “flew” over the lake and the mountains on a CD-ROM map that could show any part of the landscape of the country in three dimensions. I flew over the mountains from the area of the Black Mailbox, moved up the Groom Road, then over the hills, zooming along the runway and past the hangars, neither of which were marked, and turning to cross over Bald Mountain with a sickening plunge like a roller coaster’s. I turned on the terrain-following feature and, nosing down, saw it all dissolve as proximity overwhelmed the program’s resolution and individual pixels grew into colored angular shapes, into facets like those of a stealth plane. Finally, the screen turned as blank as the maps were before the miners and military arrived.
What the maps did show was that Dreamland is a place where things overlap. Mojave Desert meets Great Basin and quartzite overshoots Cambrian limestone; the range of the ancient Anasazi fades into and over that of the Fremont culture, where Nevada Test Site overlaps the Nellis Air Force gunnery and bombing range—which in turn are overlapped by the National Desert Wildlife Range, created in 1936 by FDR to save the bighorn sheep.
The signs warning of use of deadly force on Dreamland’s perimeter refer to the USAF/DOE liaison office in Las Vegas, for which they provide a post box number. By the best accounts, the Air Force and Department of Energy jointly administer the area, under a “Memo of Understanding.”
The Atomic Energy Commission took control of the area just to the south and west of the dry lake in 1950. Airspace here was limited beginning in 1955, and the area formally shifted from the public lands of the Nellis range to the control of the Atomic Energy Commission.
Nellis Air Force Base had greater needs, too, and by 1959 all the grazing and most of the mineral rights within the range were purchased by the Air Force.
In 1956, 369,280 acres of the Nellis range to the northwest of the lake were lent to the AEC as the Tonopah Test Range for ballistic missiles. In 1958 Public Land Order 1662, signed by one Roger Ernst, assistant secretary of the interior, withdrew from the public lands 38,400 acres (60 square miles) for use “by the Atomic Energy Commission in connection with the Nevada Test Site.” The area was the first formal survey of the six-by-ten-mile “box” around the base.
On August 11, 1961, with tensions rising in Berlin and bad news from Laos, the FAA established a new restricted airspace, designated R-4808 and covering the test site and Groom Lake. On thousands of bulletin boards in large airports and tiny control towers across the country, a NOTAM—“Notice to Airmen”—apprised pilots of the new boundary. In January 1962, the restricted airspace was expanded to 22 by 20 nautical miles in response to a request by the Air Force citing “an immediate and urgent need due to a classified project.” By the early sixties, military maps began to show the air controllers’ name for new restricted airspace over and around the base. Bordering airspaces known as Coyote, Caliente, and Alamo was “Dreamland.”
Starting about 1978, “in the interest of public safety and national defense,” the Air Force began—and here the authors of the 1985 Environmental Impact Statement for the Area 51 region become gloriously politic and delicate—“actively discouraging, and at times preventing, public or private entry to the Groom Mountain Range.” The government also put up fences on the east side of the range.
The next seizure, under Public Law 98-485, in October 1984, included Bald Mountain, the nine-thousand-foot former volcano. In a letter dated July 6, 1984, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Air Force James Boatright assured rancher Steve Medlin, the owner of the Black Mailbox, of his continuing water and grazing rights. These are measured out by the BLM in Animal Unit Months (AUMs). The Bald Mountain Allotment contains some 5,811 AUMs, which translates to 480 head of cattle and five horses. They assured the Sheahans, the owners of the site, of continued access to Groom Mine. But the Sheahans, heading there one day, found the way blocked by blue-bereted Air Force police.
Dreamland and the adjoining nuclear test site had become a de facto nature preserve. Animals could move back and forth between the two in a way humans could not. In the spring of 1985, when environmentalists visited the area to support the Air Force’s effort to withdraw from public use additional land around Groom Lake, they found that wildlife was flourishing. Jackrabbit and cottontail were abundant, as were coyotes, mule deer, badger, and kit foxes. Two mountain lions were recorded. The chukar partridge had been growing in numbers.
The area is home to six kinds of rattlesnakes, the ferruginous hawk, Swainson’s hawk, mountain plover, western snowy plover, and long-billed curlew, as well as four species of bats, ranging from the little brown myotis to Townsend’s big-eared. Naturalists defined several plant and animal communities in the area, ranging from saltbush to mixed Mojave, blackbrush/sagebrush to pinyon/juniper to mountain mahogany. There is a tiny spot of white fir at the top of Bald Mountain, the Air Force–commissioned report noted; soon it would be interrupted by a new high-tech emplacement of antennas and helipad. Thanks to the land closures, the law required archaeological investigation, which showed the area dotted with petroglyph sites, even a well-preserved nineteenth-century wooden wickiup.
Because the military had to be sure no endangered species were affected, Dreamland became one of the most carefully documented areas in the United States.
It makes me feel good about my country that tanks and nuclear tests are dependent on the cooperation of desert species. At Fort Irwin, California, to the west of Dreamla
nd, military maneuvers are required to stop if soldiers encounter the endangered desert tortoise.
Both the Nellis Range and the Nevada Test Site must have their withdrawal from the public lands regularly renewed, which resulted in an environmental impact statement prepared in 1995–96 for the whole test site. It ran to five fat purple spiral-bound volumes.
Once, the map was blank. Once, the place was real. “One of the most desolate regions upon the face of the earth,” First Lt. George Montague Wheeler called it after leading Army Corps of Engineers expeditions through the area in 1869 and again in 1871. It was tough territory, and Wheeler reminded readers of his report that his expedition took place “amid the scenes of disaster of those early emigrant trains who are accredited with having perished in ‘death valley.’ ” He was referring to notorious reports that in 1849 part of the Death Valley Party en route from Utah to California decided to take a shortcut, and camped near Groom and Papoose lakes. Only the intervention of the friendly Paiutes saved them from dying of thirst and starvation.
Unlike earlier expeditions dedicated to science, such as Clarence King’s landmark exploration of the 40th parallel a few years earlier, Wheeler’s mandate was “reconnaissance”: to map the area, survey minerals and mines, and help guide “the selection of such sites as may be of use for future military operations and occupation”—a neat foreshadowing of the later uses of the land.
On his first foray, in 1869, Wheeler and party camped at a place he called Summit Springs, between Pahranagat and the Jumbled Hills, not far from the heights from which the Interceptors would later survey Dreamland. In 1871, on his second expedition, escorted by a detachment of the Third U.S. Cavalry, Wheeler encountered the Paiutes, whom he described as “raising corn, melons and squashes” and harvesting wild grapes. Of this people, who had rescued the California-bound travelers, he added, “Virtue is almost unknown among them and syphilitic diseases very common.”
Wheeler’s photographer, called “the Shadowcatcher” by the Paiutes, was the renowned Timothy O’Sullivan, who not only left us with the first, lasting images of such wonders of the West as Canyon de Chelly but as one of Mathew Brady’s photographers had recorded dead sharpshooters in Devil’s Den at Gettysburg. O’Sullivan’s photographs of Wheeler’s party show men who look even harder than those better-known Civil War veterans. Hard-bitten, resigned, they were as used to fear in this landscape as in battle. Their faces are darkened by the sun above full beards and long sleeves.
On July 23, 1871, Wheeler’s geologist, a friend of O’Sullivan’s named G. K. Gilbert, visited Groom Mine, and the party’s report described it as “one vast deposit of galena,” a low-grade ore, mostly lead containing some silver, zinc, and copper. An advance party had been sent to the west, toward Death Valley proper, but that very night their guide disappeared—apparently deserted them—and they very nearly died. The men were down to their last mouthfuls of water before coming on a green spot they immediately named Last Chance Springs. A second guide vanished and Wheeler wrote, “His fate, so far, is uncertain; that of any one to have followed him in the particular direction he was taking when last seen would have been CERTAIN death.”
After leaving his campsite at Naquinta Springs, Wheeler headed west, trying to link up with the side party. The hills gradually opened up a prospect of Death Valley that, Wheeler wrote, “met our eyes in strange and gloomy vibrations through the superheated atmosphere.”
The same sense of foreboding landscape—more desert hallucination and nightmare of thirst than American dream—emerged in the maps Wheeler’s expedition produced as well as in O’Sullivan’s photographs. Before Wheeler, maps depicted the interior of Nevada as a great blank space, hostile, rough, forbidding. His cartographer, Louis Nell, filled it with the caterpillared hatchings of hills and lava flats, the warty peaks and scars of passes—a geological history of calamitous events. Fuzzy hatchings—whisker lines—mark the dry lakes. “Groom Mining District” and other mining districts appear as neat boxes overlaying the scarred landscape. The Black Metal Mine a mile south of Groom is shown, along with the road to Indian Springs, now closed off, and another back to the east and Hiko. Like square bandages on a tortured face, the upright lines of the mining districts—the only political markings on the map save roads and tiny towns—reveal civilian settlement that is no more than stopgap.
Today the sense of foreboding, the terror, comes across as stark beauty. Photography critics would later note that these government-financed documentary photographs, with their deadpan alien landscapes, resembled those taken by lunar or Mars landing probes.
Wheeler had noted that while there was wood and water in abundance, Groom Mine was not being worked. In September 1872 claims were filed by J. B. Osborne and partners in the White Lake and Conception Lode and British capital was invested to begin production.
The area was not called Groom until the end of World War II, when a geologist named Fred Humphrey surveyed it for the Nevada State Bureau of Mines. Previously it had been called the Naquinta Mountains or Tequima Range. Humphrey found the whole area “imperfectly mapped,” and took the range’s name from the Groom Mine, after a man named Bob Groom, who was on his way to Oregon when one day in 1864 he came across a promising chunk of ore. Groom never got rich from the claim and never mined it commercially, but he lent the mountains and the lake nearby his name.
Not until a family named Sheahan took ownership in the 1880s did any successful production begin; the Sheahans would keep the mine open through war and thin times, to the present day. Silver was the first goal of the miners, but lead became the mine’s main product. More silver was found in the nearby Pahranagat district, inspiring the 1866 Nevada legislature to create Lincoln County. Silver had driven the creation of the state of Nevada and would fuel its subsequent booms. At Dreamland, of course, the goal would be to find “silver bullet” weapons.
Fred Humphrey’s photos from the fall of 1944 show a quiet desert landscape, the lake smooth and empty except for shells from wartime gunnery practice. Humphrey mapped the faults—the graben, in geological terms—that served to concentrate lead and silver. His published report includes painstaking orange and blue foldout maps of the rock formations, shale battling limestone, jagged and zigzaggy as an abstract painting. Two huge masses of distinct rocks had pressed together. The result was like Dreamland itself: Where the strata overlapped—on the faults—substances became compressed and concentrated. To understand the strange dark history of the place, I had to explore the cultures in which it was born.
6. “The Great Atomic Power”
Like Paris with its arrondissements, or Chicago with its political wards, the Nevada Test Site is divided into numbered areas. But the numbers seem scattered at random on the map of the mostly rectilinear areas. From one perspective, the outline of the test site looks like a squared-off bird, a canyon wren, say, with its beak at the northwest formed by Pahute Mesa, Area 20, and its stubby tail, to the southeast, by Area 23 and the site’s company town, Mercury.
When the grid of the numbered areas dropped like a net over the rough geological and topographical charts in the 1950s, Groom Lake became Area 51, unfolding like a wing to the northeast. Dreamland was not just an offshoot of the NTS but, like Godzilla and a hundred other science-fiction monsters, the incidental product of nuclear testing, a mutation of Cold War thinking.
I was trying to make sense of the map of the site, conscious that soon I would be sitting in the most powerful seat of the century, the big Naugahyde chair in the Command Post of the test site from which an entire nuclear arsenal had been detonated.
I would circumnavigate the whole of the Nevada Test Site and the Nellis Range of which Dreamland was the center or, as I often thought of it, the critical core of the bomb. I stopped at Indian Springs, the little airfield from which B-29s and B-50s had taken off to drop the first test bombs in the early fifties. I passed the legal whorehouses of Nye County, lonely trailers surrounded by pickup trucks, gas pumps, and red lights ou
t by the highway—big red dome lights visible from a couple of miles down the road, the sort you might see atop a fire engine. “It’s the only place in the world where you can fill your tank, change your oil, and get a blow job all in one stop,” Derek joked.
Derek was the man who guided me through the test site. He worked for the Department of Energy and took people through the site for a living, spending whole days driving across Jackass Flats and Yucca Lake and Paiute Mesa.
Derek and I drove up from Las Vegas in one of the earliest snowfalls on record. Eighteen-wheelers had slid into the median and a pickup truck was turned over not far from a billboard offering tax-free cigarettes on sale at the Indian reservation. “I’ve never seen it like this,” Derek said as the snow swirled thicker.
We turned off at the entrance to the test site, rumbling across a cattle guard. What we saw first was “the Pen”—the chain-link-fenced yard that had regularly been used to hold anti-nuke protesters, women on one side of a divide, men on the other.
The sign above the main gate that reads WELCOME TO THE NEVADA TEST SITE AND ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH PARK invariably elicits snickers. I clutched my map as Derek drove. It marked the territories of the nuclear death’s-head, the varieties of nuclear obsession and fantasy and fear. Here the bizarre nuclear ramjet engine for aircraft had been constructed; here were conducted tests of weapons accidents and waste spills, the ones code-named Broken Spear and Bent Arrow. Here “Grable,” the nuclear cannon, was fired. JFK visited the nuclear rocket Nerva, on which once rode our hope for trips to the planets. Surrounded by his entourage, he stood in sunglasses, looking up at the tortuous pipes of the test stand. At the top of the map was the amazingly named Climax Spent Fuel Facility; to the left, and west, the Yucca Mountain project, for planned storage of nuclear wastes into the next several millennia.