Nevada National Test Site Tour

It has been more then a month since I have posted. I really haven't had time or good internet to be able to be able to post. Although I can use my phone to tether from, I have been using a lot of data so I don't want to use it on the blog. It takes more to upload the pictures.

To catch up what we have been doing is that after we left Palm Springs we went to Acton for 2 weeks. We realized with Gracie's first birthday coming up we would be driving into Ventura every day so we decided to come back to Santa Paula for birthday week.

Birthday Girl

After we left Santa Paula we went back to Palm Springs for a week. We then went to Earp, CA which is across the Colorado River from Parker, Az. The picture is from the Arizona side looking across at our RV Park. It is called Emerald Cove RV Resort.

Emerald Cove RV

The funny thing about it is that although it is in California, the entire Parker strip as they call it use Arizona time, even on the California side. Legally it was one hour earlier, but all the businesses use the later time.

We stayed a week here and really enjoyed it. One night three wild burros came into camp. Here one of them is in front of our rig.

Wild Burro's

We are now in Las Vegas. We are here for three weeks but will be coming home for Thanksgiving. 

On Wednesday we did the Nevada National Test Site tour. It is an all day free monthly tour that you need to book 5 to 6 months in advance.

You are loaded into a nice motorcoach at the Atomic Museum in Vegas. They take you to the test site about 70 miles outside of Vegas. You are assigned badges and they are checked at the security check. A soldier comes on the bus and actually touches and checks the front and back of each and every badge. No cameras or phones or computers or even binoculars are allowed on the tour so from now on all pictures are photos I found on the internet but do properly describe what we saw!

Security Check

Obviously I won't show or describe the whole tour as it was from 8:00-4:00 and about 250 miles, but the highlights were as follows.

The Aluminum Domes were setup to see if they could stand up to the atomic blast. Not only did they crumble but when you looked into the whole they were actually melted. 6" thick cement also did not hold up, but 2' thick did.

Aluminum Domes

This train trestle is warped and mangled. This was from a bomb dropped from a plane about 1600 feet away.

Train Trestle

The bank vault held up. The contents were fine although it was said the contents were warm inside.

Bank Vault

We went by a low level waste dump. I was surprised that it was not buried deeper then it was. They put the waste in train containers and then put them in pits maybe 20 feet deep.

The bus drove down into a fairly shallow crater.  The Bilby crater is about 80 feet deep. This one is created by an underground explosion.

Bilby Crater

The Apple II House is one of the houses you saw in the old newsreel films with the mannequins in them. Because of all the reinforcing in the house it actually held up during the blasts.

Apple II House

The Sedan Crater is the worlds largest man made crater at 320 feet deep and 1280 feet across. A 104 kilaton bomb displaced 6.5 million cubic yards of dirt. This was a test to consider using nuclear for clearing large areas of dirt and rocks. The project was called ploughshare.

Sedan Crater

That's it for today. We will try not to make it so long next time!

God Bless,

Brian and Patty

Bombay Beach Apocalypse!

Scott wanted to drive all around the Salton Sea. Last year we headed to the east side and saw Bombay Beach and the North Shore Yacht Club. This year we started on the west side. We drove into Salton City and Desert Shores. Patty and I had done that a few weeks ago, but Scott and Terri and not seen those towns yet.

After driving through those towns we stopped at the Red Earth Casino for Scott to fill up his truck with diesel. It is by far the cheapest place in the area at $3.79 a gallon! We continued on through Westmoreland and headed up to the Sonny Bono Salton Sea National Wildlife Refuge.

Of course with the government pinheads being shutdown this HUGE wilderness area that should be just left open was shut down. It was not even gated because there are no gates, it just had barricades up.This is just another case of our president being nasty, trying to prove a point! Like when he had Secretary of Defense Hagle refuse to pay for our brave servicemen funerals!

A lot of anger in our country!

Ok, enough about politics and back to our day!

We continued to the east side of the sea. Scott is a big train fan so we stopped next to the train tracks to have lunch. We got to watch several freight trains as we munched on our sandwiches. Our friend Bill Gehr who some of you know as a friend, and some of you may have read his reviews in Trailer Life or MotorHome magazines or know him as the "Ask the Expert" in RV Journal or "Ask RV Bill" in the Thousand Trails Trail Blazer magazine called just checking up on us while we were stopped.

We will see Bill in December because we will both be Park Hosting along the beach in Ventura. We won't be at the same park but we will be within a few miles of each other overlapping for two months! Wahoo!!

We continued to Bombay Beach and pulled into the community. There are approximately 245 residents "living" in Bombay Beach. It truly reminds you of one of those apocalypse type of movies..

Rubble at Bombay Beach

I saw on Zillow that there is a 1500 square foot house that has been foreclosed on that the bank is asking $9,500.00! Yep, nine thousand five hundred dollars for a house and property! This is a very depressed area!

In the 60's this was becoming a very popular and exclusive place to come vacation. But with the water turning bad and then in the 70's a hurricane from mexico brought heavy weather up here and flooded all this away. With all the salt and toxicity of the water it destroyed everything here. It was never repaired and still sits like it was before the storm.

Luxury trailer

They have built berms around the town which you can see in the background of the above picture to keep it from happening again.

This is what remains from the old dock.

Old Dock

Because all the fish were dying in this horrible water, they stocked it with tilapia, gulf croaker, corvina, and sargo.  The tilapia weigh up to 3.5 pounds, and the corvina have weighed up to 37 pounds and measured 42 inches.

The Salton Sea has a salinity level of over 4.0, way over seawater. Once it reaches 4.4 there is a belief that only the tilapia will be able to survive.

Dead Fish

You can see how bad the water is by this chair that was fished out of the water!

Chair

We continued the loop around the sea. In all it was about 150 miles. We got back and rested a while. We then went to Mario's Italian and had antipasto salad and a large pizza that we shared among the four of us. After that we went to the VillageFest in Palm Springs. It is a weekly event on Thursday nights that is about 6-8 blocks long on Palm Canyon Blvd. They block the street off and venders hock their wares.

It was a great day with great friends!

Tomorrow is more of a rest day...

God Bless,

Brian and Patty