Ancient Lands, Atomic Age

From Billion-Year Canyons to the Dawn of the Nuclear Era

The American Southwest compresses more time into visible landscape than anywhere else on Earth. This tour traces an arc from the Grand Canyon's two-billion-year geological record through 50,000-year-old impact craters, thousand-year-old cliff dwellings, and astronomical cities of the ancient Puebloans -- ending where Robert Oppenheimer watched the world's first nuclear detonation light up the New Mexico desert.

Itinerary

1. Two Billion Years, One Mile Deep — The Colorado River has been cutting this canyon for six million years, exposing rock that was ancient before life crawled onto land.
2. The Day the Sky Fell — Fifty thousand years ago, a nickel-iron asteroid traveling 26,000 miles per hour punched a hole three-quarters of a mile wide in the Arizona plateau.
3. The Stone Forest — Two hundred million years ago, a tropical forest fell and was buried in volcanic ash. Time turned the wood to quartz, jasper, and amethyst -- a forest preserved in gemstone.
4. The Navajo Monuments — The Mittens, Merrick Butte, and Totem Pole -- sandstone towers rising from the desert floor of the Navajo Nation, icons of the American West.
5. The City in the Cliff — One hundred and fifty rooms, twenty-three kivas, tucked into a sandstone alcove eight hundred feet above the canyon floor -- the largest cliff dwelling in North America.
6. The Astronomers of Chaco — A thousand years ago, the Ancestral Puebloans built a city aligned to the sun, moon, and stars -- with roads stretching hundreds of miles across the desert to communities they connected by line of sight.
7. A Thousand Years, Still Standing — The multi-story adobe structures of Taos Pueblo have been continuously inhabited for over a thousand years -- the oldest continuously occupied dwellings in North America.
8. The Mesa Where the World Changed — On a remote mesa above the Rio Grande, a secret city of physicists built the weapon that ended World War II and opened the atomic age.
9. The Flash That Changed Everything — At 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945, the first nuclear weapon detonated in the New Mexico desert. The flash was visible from 250 miles away. The sand turned to glass.