On 12/31/02 I was mountain-biking on the trails in a public forest preserve park near Palos Park, Illinois. It was late in the afternoon of the last day of the year, I was getting ready to go home, and much to my surprise I came across a stone marking the burial of nuclear waste material, right there in the forest preserve. I have gone back to visit the site every 12/31 since then. It’s a nice way to close out the year.
The view as you approach the Plot M central marker stone in the Palos Park Forest Preserve.
On that afternoon in 2002 I had spotted what appeared, at a distance, to be either the headstone of a grave or else an electrical transformer, in the middle of a large clearing on a trail I hadn’t yet explored. It looked like a pale cube of some sort. It was quite surprising to approach it and see this:
Central marker, Plot M.
For some years before then, I had been reading casually about the development of the atomic bomb. A friend and I had even made a big trip from Boston, specifically to visit the Trinity site near Alamagordo, New Mexico, where the very first atomic bomb test took place on July 16, 1945. It’s on an active missile range (non-nuclear) called the White Sands Missile Range (note: you may encounter a bizarre pop-up message in which the US Military warns you that you’re going to be monitored while visiting their site, so don’t be freaked out), which gets shut down on the first Saturday in April and the first Saturday in October, when the public are allowed to come and visit the crater and nearby relics. My visit was in 1998 and was well worth the trip. Here‘s a map of the site. I’ve got a lot more to say about the whole affair, so stay tuned.
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Palos Park Visit – 12/31/09
On 12/31/02 I was mountain-biking on the trails in a public forest preserve park near Palos Park, Illinois. It was late in the afternoon of the last day of the year, I was getting ready to go home, and much to my surprise I came across a stone marking the burial of nuclear waste material, right there in the forest preserve. I have gone back to visit the site every 12/31 since then. It’s a nice way to close out the year.
The view as you approach the Plot M central marker stone in the Palos Park Forest Preserve.
On that afternoon in 2002 I had spotted what appeared, at a distance, to be either the headstone of a grave or else an electrical transformer, in the middle of a large clearing on a trail I hadn’t yet explored. It looked like a pale cube of some sort. It was quite surprising to approach it and see this:
Central marker, Plot M.
For some years before then, I had been reading casually about the development of the atomic bomb. A friend and I had even made a big trip from Boston, specifically to visit the Trinity site near Alamagordo, New Mexico, where the very first atomic bomb test took place on July 16, 1945. It’s on an active missile range (non-nuclear) called the White Sands Missile Range (note: you may encounter a bizarre pop-up message in which the US Military warns you that you’re going to be monitored while visiting their site, so don’t be freaked out), which gets shut down on the first Saturday in April and the first Saturday in October, when the public are allowed to come and visit the crater and nearby relics. My visit was in 1998 and was well worth the trip. Here‘s a map of the site. I’ve got a lot more to say about the whole affair, so stay tuned.