Los Alamos

The board's population figure, 17,599, is Los Alamos County's count in the 1980 census, which dates it. For its first fourteen years the town on this road was closed: a fenced, gated government community where visitors needed a pass arranged a day ahead, until the gates came down on February 18, 1957, to the dismay of many residents who liked their unlocked doors. The county was carved out in 1949, and houses passed into private hands in 1962. The panel misnames the laboratory in the plural.

What the plaque says

Official Scenic Historic Marker Los Alamos Population 17,599 - Elevation 7,324 Located near the ancient Indian sites of the Pajarito Plateau, Los Alamos is one of New Mexico's newest towns. In 1942 a boys' ranch school became the head- quarters of the Manhattan Project, which led to the development of the atomic bomb. Los Alamos National Laboratories continues to be a center for nuclear and other scientific research.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fuller Lodge — 2.9 mi
  The upright-log dining hall of a boys' ranch school, which fed and housed the Manhattan Project after the Army bought the school in 1942.
• Bandelier National Monument — 6.8 mi
  Rooms carved into soft volcanic tuff in Frijoles Canyon, named for a Swiss scholar who was led there in 1880 by a man from Cochiti Pueblo.
• Valles Caldera National Preserve — 13 mi
  A crater thirteen miles across, floored with grass, left by an eruption 1.25 million years ago and owned privately for 140 years under a law that called it vacant land.
• El Santuario de Chimayó — 20 mi
  A small adobe shrine on the High Road to Taos, built around 1816 over earth that pilgrims still carry away in hope of healing.

More markers nearby

• Peggy Pond Church — 3.1 mi
• Pueblo of San Ildefonso — 7.3 mi
• Maria Montoya Martinez — 7.3 mi
• Jémez Mountains — 8.2 mi