In search of Oppenheimer's New Mexico

On the highway between Abiquiú and Ghost Ranch is Bode’s General Store – a roadside waystation beloved for its tamales and green chili burgers. It is not so different than it was 80 years ago, when O’Keeffe and Oppenheimer were among its clientele. And during the filming of Oppenheimer, Ybbaro said, it was a standby for cast and crew, too. 

Oppenheimer’s invisible legacy

Oppenheimer and colleagues took more than inspiration from these landscapes. Families with land downwind from White Sands or any of the hundreds of uranium mining sites in the region – a community known today as “downwinders” – know the Manhattan Project cost untold lives in New Mexico. In the forthcoming documentary First We Bombed New Mexico, filmmaker Lois Lipman shares dozens of accounts that together paint the picture of “massive cancers and deaths” that swept across the state in the decades after the Trinity test. 

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People can still experience the landscapes central to this part of the story, too – if they dare. Places like Hoot Owl Canyon, once called “Hot Canyon” by the government because of its red-hot gamma radiation levels from the Trinity test’s nuclear fallout carried by the wind, are open to the public, Lipman said. There are no recent studies indicating whether the area is still radioactive. But radioactivity in nuclear fallout has a shelf life of 24,000 years – or as some downwinders put it, 7,000 generations.

Like the scenic Pajarito Plateau and Ghost Ranch, Hot Canyon, with its red-rock bridges and pinnacles, is forever linked with Oppenheimer – albeit controversially. Indeed, 18 months after the Manhattan Project started, Oppenheimer is said to have stared out over the desert he loved, and confessed, “I am responsible for ruining a beautiful place.”

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