Maybe this is the spot?

Alternative blog post title: No Bad Days on the Bike

In the picture above, you might be looking at the spot where the Air Force in 1957 accidentally dropped a nuclear bomb on the mesa south of Albuquerque.

Nuclear history nerds have dropped their Google map pins at a couple of places along this two-track dirt ranch road. The Mark 17 bomb wasn’t armed (the plutonium capsule had been removed), but the conventional explosives all by themselves created a crater 25 feet wide and 12 feet deep when it hit.

A B-36 “Peacemaker” (really, that’s what they called it) was on final approach to Albuquerque when something happened – maybe one of the crew accidentally grabbed the release lever to steady himself against turbulence. (Great write up here about the whole affair.) The bomb, minus its plutonium, slammed through the bomb bay doors. It is obligatory in written accounts to note that it killed a cow.

The Air Force lied and filled in the hole, and the details weren’t released until the 1980s, when an Albuquerque Journal reporter named David Morrissey used the Freedom of Information Act to pry the accident reports loose. His FOIA work was legend. I inherited his desk and beat and filed a lot of nuclear weapons FOIAs, but never got anything this good.

On our bike “ride” today (note the tire rut in the sand, there was walk-a-bike and at least one goathead-inspired flat) we found a circular area with different vegetation that seemed like the right size to be the spot. It matched a map I can’t remember the source of. Another map puts it a couple hundred feet to the north. It’s about 2-1/2 miles of increasingly ratty dirt roads from the big Netflix studios where they make all those shows, somewhere around here.

The sealant in my front tire lost the battle with the goatheads, which were wicked. The sand was, at times, also wicked. But the people we thought were probably serial killers were just out with their dogs (far too well behaved to be serial killers’ dogs). We found lots of other weird stuff, often with bullet holes. The coolest weird stuff on our desert rides has bullet holes.

We’ve tried a couple of times before to find the bomb place. I’m gonna call it good this time ‘round.

As I said, no bad days on the bike.