On the road to Los Alamos

A few observations on Cheyenne Mountain:

• All the personnel at Cheyenne Mountain wore flight suits, except the one U.S. Marine officer we saw on the tour; he was dressed in the standard camouflage battle dress uniform. Even here, a Marine is a Marine.

• While we were at Cheyenne Mountain, an exercise was in progress, and each room had to be "sanitized" before we could enter it. In the Command Center, the displays were all replaced with declassified versions. Elsewhere, monitors were turned off or switched to screen savers. As a result, we learned quite a bit about the actual operation of the center, but nothing about the exercise.

  For example, in the Space Command Center, there is a sign indicating the current Defense Condition (DEFCON), just like in the movies: from 5, the lowest state of alert, to 1, which means war. The real DEFCON was displayed as 5, which was reassuring; the DEFCON for the exercise was not displayed.

• One of the 25-ton blast doors was closed and re-opened a few times so we could videotape it; however, the hydraulic pins that lock it into the rock could not be fired without further authorization.

• The thud that the blast door makes when it closes is perhaps the most solid, final and ominous sound I have ever heard. I recommend the QuickTime, though no Web browser can do the sound justice.

From a previous trip, I recall that the landscape of Southern Colorado is breathtaking; this time, I slept through it. Sorry.

Northern New Mexico, on the other hand, is spectacular. No two miles of highway look alike, and to someone raised in the East, it's astonishing how many types of terrain can exist so close together, and yet none of them fall below a mile elevation.

Los Alamos is a much smaller town than I expected from the bold type on the map; it is still very much a "company town" alongside the lab. At the edge of town, a guard tower still stands; entry to the town is wide open, but the tower itself is locked up.