310. Los Alamos, Los Alamos County (NM10)

Welcome to the birthplace of Oppenheimer‘s deadly toy. As an amateur physicist and historian, I was all aflutter here. This is where the country’s greatest minds assembled and the result was barely avoided doom in the age of reason (sidenote: if I ever had an emo band, I would name it Doom In The Age Of Reason so back off. I got dibs). In the predawn you can’t see how remote it is, but once you see it with the sun up, you almost can’t help but be blown away by the vistas. Somewhat ironically, I almost didn’t think there was going to be a county courthouse for you here, much like I was worried about Mora. But I did find the Justice Center here and there were some deputies here, getting ready to go about their day so I was able to confirm with one of them that this was the place. It seems relatively new, but that’s to be expected since the federal government probably had direct control here until pretty recently (as counties go, that is). On any other day I would have wandered the streets and museums, looking to soak in a bit of the history, but time, as always, was not entirely on my side. I had work to do here.

The first two caches I went for were busts: one commonly found that I just didn’t see and one in a park I just couldn’t find. Well, I probably could have if I spent more than five minutes looking. Or maybe not. I might have just sucked at caching that day. This was definitely not an auspicious beginning like the previous day had had. But I found a beginner’s cache in a tree, made for kids. and it fit the bill. So I grabbed it and claimed it as I would any other. What I didn’t know until I got home to check some numbers was that this was (and still is as of this writing) both my farthest cache from home and my highest elevation cache. At least until I drive up Pike’s Peak one day, that is…

Times like this I despair trying to cover so much ground so quickly. I would have loved to spend a morning just hanging around here, but is anything even open on a Sunday? Wait a minute… It was Monday, wasn’t it? Sometimes I can barely even keep the days straight! But I knew I was here on a mission. I passed back through the old Main Gate and descended from the mesa, preparing to arrive in…