crEasing into Retirement: Along the Highways in New Mexico...

Other than Four Corners, I was excited to see two more places along the route Hubby had chosen on the trip home. One was the community of Los Alamos and the other Taos. But first, here are some of the interesting things we saw along those less traveled highways in northern New Mexico.

a little snow in the higher elevations after Jemez Springs

someone used some creativity to create the

face of a monster on this outcropping

Do you see it?

the eye, the rock fang to match the white rock marking?

We had to pass through a check point to enter the city of Los Alamos as the part of town we entered was the site of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The reason I was pleased we would be driving through this itty, bitty county and its city was because Hubby's referee partner for many years, a math teacher, was awarded a chance to work on a research project one summer while teaching at the high school. A really big deal for a Watertown SD teacher.

Hubby's license was checked and recorded at the check point and I was told not to take any photos. So I obeyed and there are no photos, not even of the signage at the entrance to the National Laboratory. There were many research campuses which led us to asking, just what is researched at Los Alamos? We saw medical and technical areas. I thought there was a large telescope high on some mountain that does outer space research. I thought that was the reason for Los Alamos. Well...Wikipedia tells me Los Alamos National Laboratory "is recognized as the birthplace" of the atomic bomb. (I knew the atomic bomb was tested in New Mexico, north of White Sands and closer to Almogordo. But I did not know LANL was the beginning.)

"As of 2017, the Los Alamos National Laboratory is using data and algorithms to possibly protect public health by tracking the growth of infectious diseases. Digital epidemiologists at the lab's Information Systems and Modeling group are using clinical surveillance data, Google search queries, census data, Wikipedia, and even tweets to create a system that could predict epidemics. The team is using data from Brazil as its model; Brazil was notably threatened by the Zika virus as it prepared to host the Summer Olympics in 2016." ~ Wikipedia

"Today, Los Alamos is one of the largest science and technology institutions in the world. It conducts multidisciplinary research in fields such as national security, space exploration, nuclear fusion, renewable energy, medicine, nanotechnology, and supercomputing." ~ Wikipedia

"LANL is northern New Mexico's largest institution and the largest employer with approximately 9,000 direct employees and around 650 contractor personnel. Additionally, there are roughly 120 DOE employees stationed at the laboratory to provide federal oversight of LANL's work and operations. Approximately one-third of the laboratory's technical staff members are physicists, one quarter are engineers, one-sixth are chemists and materials scientists, and the remainder work in mathematics and computational science, biology, geoscience, and other disciplines. Professional scientists and students also come to Los Alamos as visitors to participate in scientific projects. The staff collaborates with universities and industry in both basic and applied research to develop resources for the future. The annual budget is approximately $2.2 billion." ~ Wikipedia

"Fenton Hill Observatory is an astronomical research facility operated by Los Alamos National Laboratory in the Jemez Mountains of New Mexico, about 35 miles west of Los Alamos. The site is home to several astronomical experiments and observatories spanning 30 acres. It is also known as Technical Area 57 (TA-57) and is located at an elevation of 8,700 feet in a region shielded from light pollution. Los Alamos National Laboratory has a use agreement with the Forest Service." ~ Wikipedia

Sooooo, there is a telescope and RAPTOR which does study happenings in outer space.