On the Road in New Mexico: When Los Alamos was a Ranch School

My friend Kim and I decided we just had to get out of the village the other day, so we headed over to Valles Caldera, an amazing National Preserve about 40 minutes from our house. To get there, we went through the town of Los Alamos—a place I’d never been.

Of course, I knew it was the site of the Manhattan Project and the development of the first atomic bomb. However, I had only heard in passing about the elite boy’s school established there by Ashley Pond, a Detroit businessman. Founded in 1917 on the isolated Pajarito Plateau, the Los Alamos Ranch School was designed as an “outdoor school” to combine a rigorous college preparatory curriculum with intense physical activity in the wilderness.

The school’s core philosophy aimed to instill self-confidence, health, and a deep, intimate connection to nature in “city-bred boys.” Rather than just treating the wilderness as an outdoor gym or playground, the founders aimed to teach a holistic, “rugged lifestyle” heavily influenced by Theodore Roosevelt’s philosophy of “the strenuous life” and the early conservation movement.

Kim knew quite a bit about this history and took me by the old campus. Its famous alumni include William S. Burroughs and Gore Vidal. It felt rather poignant to visit the school shortly after Vidal’s death on July 31st.

Fuller Lodge, the main kitchen-dining facility, was designed by Santa Fe architect John Gaw Meem. As I strolled through this amazing building, I could almost feel history emanating from its log walls of ponderosa pine—ah, the stories they could tell.

Winding our way upstairs into the old dormitories, we found a sleeping room outfitted exactly as it had been back then.

Standing on the grounds, even while surrounded by modern downtown Los Alamos, it was still easy to picture what life must have been like during the school’s heyday: wide-open fields, mesas, the nearby Jemez Mountains, and the Valle Grande. I could envision troops of boys heading out on horseback for pack trips and tending to the daily care of saddle and pack animals—something quite foreign to the school’s city boys, I’m sure.

Sadly, the school closed in 1942 when the campus and surrounding land were purchased by the U.S. Army’s Manhattan Engineering District for top-secret bomb development. According to Wikipedia, the site was chosen because of its isolation, access to water, pre-existing housing, and the fact that much of the surrounding land was already federally owned. It offered ample space and was located on a mesa where all entrances could be tightly secured. Originally referred to as “Site Y,” it later became the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, and eventually, the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

During World War II, Fuller Lodge was used as a social gathering place for project personnel, while other campus buildings were used for housing. The faculty houses were famously nicknamed “Bathtub Row” because they were the only homes in Los Alamos with bathtubs.

There are also wonderful stories about the wildlife that shared the land. According to Earl H. Kieselhorst, a student from 1919 to 1923 who was quoted in When Los Alamos was a Ranch School: “In the summer of 1919 the bears were a constant source of amusement. They roamed freely with a pack of Airedales. With the first cold days of fall, they prepared to hibernate by dragging the doormats under the porch.”

This history hits close to home for me. I knew Oppenheimer’s son; we called him Oppy. He lived with the heavy weight of sorrow and guilt over what his father had created. Meanwhile, my own father, a medic in WWII, was sent to Nagasaki the morning after the bomb was dropped. He would never talk about it.

I know that, for some, Los Alamos Labs is an important part of our nation’s history. But regardless of my feelings about the bomb itself, as an artist and dreamer, I carry a deep sense of remorse that what Ashley Pond conceived and brought into being was cut short. Just imagine what might have been had generations of boys—and, ultimately, girls—been allowed to continue their education there, shaping a worldview sensitive to the balance of nature and its impact on our well-being. How much better it would have been to see an education tied permanently to the land, rather than the creation of the world’s first atomic bomb.

Love to you all,
Jeane

Originally published August 13, 2012

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