The Road to Los Alamos
I’m sitting in the Quark Bar in downtown Los Alamos, New Mexico. Poster-sized black-and-white photographs of physicists J. Robert Oppenheimer and Hans Bethe loom over my head alongside faded nuclear warning signage to “stay out.” The bartender, a young man seemingly oblivious to the iconography around him, comes over and asks what I’ll have. The question momentarily catches me off guard, but as I look around and think about where I’m sitting, an inspiration flashes across my mind. “I’ll have a Manhattan,” I say.
He doesn’t get the irony. He’s not even sure how to mix the drink. Apparently, I’m too old-fashioned for him. In fact, he has no idea how far back my sense of the present tense goes.
Back in the 1980s, in a former life as a PhD-degreed political scientist, I taught undergraduates and wrote academically about U.S. nuclear strategy and was intimately familiar with the Manhattan Project. That’s the massive, top-secret World War II–era program that led to the design and deployment of the only atomic bombs ever actually used in combat. It was here on a remote mesa in north-central New Mexico that Oppenheimer served as a kind of camp counselor for the country’s best physicists, engineers, and mathematicians, all of whom he had gathered for what amounted to a three-year science project. He also acted as informal town mayor as well as spiritual guru and mentor to (future) Nobel laureates. The task of managing day-to-day business, as well as paying the bills, was left to his unlikely collaborator, a Pentagon bureaucrat named General Leslie Groves.
4. Aerial photo of Los Alamos Municipal Golf Course, 1949. Courtesy of Los Alamos Historical Museum Photo Archives.
“Oppie” was tall, lanky, Jewish, highly educated, capable of extremely literate and philosophical discourse, and comfortable associating with radicals and Communists. Among the many ironies of Oppenheimer’s life is that this urbane intellectual easterner was transfixed by the New Mexico landscape. In the 1920s and 1930s he would often escape for weeks into the Sangre de Cristo Mountains east of Los Alamos, where his family owned a cabin and ranchland. Oppenheimer was a skilled enough horseman that he might head off for overnight rides outfitted with only a few candy bars in his back pocket and not even a trail map for guidance.
He was fluent in seven languages, inspired by the Bhagavad Gita, wore a rakish porkpie hat, and the only time he would put down a cigarette was to pick up a martini. Groves, by contrast, was stocky, conservative, gruff in manner, and coarse in his administrative style. He was a teetotaler whose dress code never varied from army-issue khakis. How the two managed to tolerate and support each other’s work long enough to develop the atomic bomb is the subject of a considerable literature and many documentary films.
Earlier that afternoon I had stood between the two of them, so to speak, with my arms draped over the necks of these two historic figures in the form of their bronze, life-sized statues. The were posed side by side in front of the old log cabin main building of the Los Alamos Ranch School that the War Department had requisitioned in late 1942, when it brought the Manhattan Project here. And now, six decades later, I’m in town as part of a small consulting team that golf architect Andy Staples has assembled to evaluate the county’s municipal golf course.
My first day at Los Alamos was an auspicious one. I had come to New Mexico during a particularly ominous time, July 2011, when the largest wildfires in state history had just forced the evacuation of the town. In fact, my visit had almost been canceled, but at the last minute the town was declared safe, and residents were allowed back two days before I got there.
All year the weather had been frighteningly dry; rainfall for 2011 through early July totaled all of two one-hundredths of an inch (0.02-inch). A week before my visit the Las Conchas fire had broken out in Bandelier National Monument west of Santa Fe. Winds fanned the fire to the point that by the time I got there, it had engulfed over two hundred square miles, making it the largest wildfire in state history. News reports suggested the worst of the fire had now abated, but the massive plumes of smoke were still evident to my left in the distance as I drove up from Albuquerque. As I completed the nerve-wracking, edge-of-doom drive into Los Alamos, I saw that the town’s airport was jammed with firefighting equipment, small planes, bulldozers, and utility vehicles, all arrayed there at the forefront of a widespread effort to keep the town from burning down. Ahead of me, atop the rim behind the town, smoke rose above bare hilltop. The town had survived, but the gods were still steaming.
Los Alamos is unique in all of American life for having been a secret town—even to long-term residents of Santa Fe and the Native American inhabitants of the neighboring pueblos. It was allowed to develop under a protective cloak of national security before it was revealed to the public as home to the atomic bomb. Some 36 miles northwest of downtown Santa Fe, at an elevation of 7,100 feet above sea level, the town—actually a county—is only 109 square miles and has a population of 18,500. Its sits at the end of a long cul-de-sac access road, Route 502, that runs up onto the Pajarito Plateau and nestles into the eastern outslope of the Jemez Mountains. Los Alamos enjoys tremendous natural assets of scenery, exposure to the rugged outdoors, and varied terrain.
The county’s isolation from everyday New Mexican and American life can best be understood as the result of geographical isolation, deliberate political policy, and a culture of intensive scientific research embedded in the Los Alamos National Laboratory—to this day the county’s primary employer, with 13,500 on the payroll. Until August 1945 life up on “The Hill” was kept top secret under the aegis of the Manhattan Project. Visitors to the lab or scientists about to take up posts in residence would report to an innocuous-looking office in Santa Fe, just around the corner from the downtown Plaza. There they were greeted by Dorothy McKibben, a cheerful middle-aged Smith College alumna (class of 1919) whom Oppenheimer had hired as his secretary after a five-minute interview. Starting in 1943 and working from that office at 109 East Palace, McKibben managed to process newcomers to the lab without actually betraying to anyone (including Oppenheimer) how little—or how much—she knew about what was really going on up on The Hill. She assigned everyone the same mailing address, Box 1663, Santa Fe. That address appeared on driver’s licenses of lab employees and on the birth certificates of their newborn children for over a decade before actual street names and numbers were publicly divulged.
Los Alamos inhabitants largely lived a self-contained, spartan life. Living quarters for most of the scientists were little more than barracks. Some married couples had tiny cottages. Oppenheimer was among the elite handful who lived in substantial houses—formerly the homes of administrators at the Los Alamos Ranch School and within walking distance of the main lab building. Plumbing, water supply, and drainage were primitive. Only the few houses were equipped with actual bathtubs—thus their address, Bathtub Row.
Back then residents worked relentlessly, with Sundays off for recreation and the rest of their time devoted to scientific and engineering research, intent upon developing atomic weaponry. Among the many diversionary activities that developed was an informal, little nine-hole sand greens golf course in what was called the Western Area. The site now is part of the campus of the University of New Mexico–Los Alamos, a mile west of downtown.
After World War II the veil of secrecy around Los Alamos was partially lifted, and day-to-day life fell to the administration of the civilian-controlled Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). Many who made up the original corps of scientists, including leading luminaries from major universities, went back home to their own research. There was a subtle shift in the town’s ethos after 1947, with the AEC trying hard to remobilize a commitment among scientists to Los Alamos and to the next great research project, a thermonuclear weapon (the H-bomb). Housing and roads were dramatically improved. Schools were expanded—with Groves invariably complaining about the cost. What had been a ramshackle settlement was converted into a permanent community with a town center—though still with tightly controlled access in and out.
Among the amenities added to make life bearable for the newly reorganized lab was a full, eighteen-hole golf course that replaced the makeshift first course in town. The new site was out on Diamond Drive, a three-mile ride from downtown on a broad plain set back from Walnut Canyon. Design and construction began in 1947 and took two years, with distinct phases involving a front nine designed by Bill Keith on the southeast side of the road, which opened first, followed by a back nine designed by William H. Tucker, with six holes on the northwest side of the crossing.
Designer C. W. “Bill” Keith Jr. (1906–2000) was an Oklahoma native who worked for the U.S. Postal Service for a decade before becoming a golf professional in 1936 and serving at various courses in western Texas and New Mexico, including Los Alamos Municipal Golf Course (LAMGC), where he was pro and superintendent in 1947–48. A decade later he became a golf course designer and builder in the Southwest. His one confirmed design credit is Lake Carlsbad Municipal Golf Course in Carlsbad, New Mexico.
In contrast, William H. Tucker (1871–1954) had a considerable golf design résumé. A native of England, where he learned both sports turf management and golf course design and construction, he came to the United States in 1895 and became a respected greenkeeper and golf club maker. His early design credits involved work on such prominent private New York clubs as Saint Andrew’s and Maidstone as well as at two municipal courses in Queens County, New York City: Clearview and Douglaston Park.
Tucker went on, in collaboration with his son, William H. Tucker Jr. (1895–1962), to maintain active offices in Los Angeles, New York City, and Portland, Oregon, and to design many courses across the American West, including three other New Mexico tracts: Riverside Country Club in Carlsbad (eighteen holes, 1947); Portales 1 Course (nine holes, 1948); and the University of New Mexico Golf Club–North Course (eighteen holes, 1951) in Albuquerque, of which nine holes remain today. A noteworthy detail in the history of Los Alamos Municipal Golf Course is that Tucker’s lifelong interest in improving turf culminated with his involvement in establishing the original playing fields at two of the nation’s most venerable sports grounds, Yankee Stadium and the West Side Tennis Club (Forest Hills) in Queens, former home of the U.S. Tennis Open.
If only Tucker had been so lucky at Los Alamos. The soil bed for the golf course was virtually unmanageable—or, more precisely, nonexistent. The entire area was coated with “tuff,” an ossified layer of infertile ash, technically an extrusive igneous rock deposited by an eruption of the Jemez Volcano 1.4 million years ago that then lithified into impervious sediment. It’s about the worst imaginable ground for cultivating quality golf turf. Given the nature of the ground, there would have been no techniques for subsurface drainage; everything depended upon surface flow.
Befitting a scientifically inclined community with limited resources and unlimited imagination, the golf course was watered not with potable water but with recycled, effluent water from the town—the first golf course in the United States based upon such an irrigation supply. LAMGC was also only the third eighteen-hole golf course in the state, the first in all of northern New Mexico, and quite likely the first eighteen-hole golf course in the state with full grass greens.
Despite the limitation of turf quality and maintenance, LAMGC was operated throughout the 1950s and 1960s as a premier facility, akin to a full-service country club in an area that, while blessed with natural riches, was short on recreation and entertainment. The AEC oversaw the club as it did all of life in Los Alamos, with day-to-day maintenance contracted out to the Zia Company, an Albuquerque-based construction-management firm that did all of the work at Los Alamos.
Eventually, by the early 1960s, day-to-day operations of the golf club were overseen by a volunteer Los Alamos Golf Association, which had control over budgets, hiring, fees, rules, and the entire calendar of events. The clubhouse drew widely from the community, with members and daily-fee guests drawn by a range of amenities: golf, a restaurant, a bar with music and dancing in the evenings, and, starting in 1960, a swimming pool. In 1967 the AEC turned over operations of the golf course and club to county administration, at which point Los Alamos technically became a municipal facility.
As with any golf course, the character of the layout changed over the years thanks to trees planted, partial reroutings of holes on the front and the back to solve safety issues and to accommodate a pool and the driving range, holes shifted to conform to an expanded Diamond Drive, an expanded clubhouse, and the installation of a new irrigation system in 1985—a task that remained poorly done. Due to inadequate trenching of the pipe, parts of the irrigation system sat so close to the surface that superintendents could not aerify the soil adequately. Turf conditions continually suffered, never so drastically than in 2011, when intense winter cold led to winterkill and delayed recovery. Aerification issues aside, the course never got an adequate storage pond and had to rely exclusively on the county’s effluent water treatment plant.
From the Starbucks in downtown Los Alamos where I start every morning I’m in town, it’s still just a three-mile drive to the course, a big clockwise loop onto Diamond Drive. I spot the course ahead of me, but then, as the road makes a big curve rightward, I’m scrambling to find the entrance to the golf course, and by the time I spot it, I find myself going too fast, even at the speed limit, to brake and make the downhill, hairpin right turn into the badly angled entrance. I have to go on to just past the golf course, make a U-turn via the traffic circle up top at the end of Diamond Drive, and double back, this time risking another frightening turn, a left across oncoming traffic. I can’t help thinking that for a town with the world’s brightest engineers, they didn’t spend much time figuring out the traffic flow here.
There’s an old adage in the golf industry that the impression you get in the first three minutes at a golf course goes a long way toward determining how you feel about the place in the long run. I’m trying to be open-minded, but the feel of the coarsely paved parking lot isn’t very inviting and the image of the pillbox clubhouse even less so. I’m reassured, sort of, to find out it’s only a temporary structure because the county has just begun a $5.4 million project that will usher in an entirely new building. The plans look impressive enough, but I am also unsettled by the priorities of a municipal enterprise that first puts its money into a clubhouse and only then explores what’s possible for the golf course. And a quick look of the golf course tells me this is a place that needs some serious investing.
The course looks beat-up. Turf cover is thin, the result, it turns out, of a very tough year whereby freezes that created lots of winterkill were followed by sustained heat and drought-like conditions. The trees, too, have suffered. Cottonwood and eucalyptus trees seem tired and droopy. The cart paths look like they have begun shedding their paving material and have wandered off aimlessly on their own. And as I start walking the holes in sequence, I see confirmatory evidence that things are not going well: the putting greens are all rounded off, uniform in appearance, and what passes for bunkers are little more than sandy scrapes in the earth without much definition, depth, or structure. I feel sad.
It’s not the staff’s fault. Veteran golf course superintendent Richard Matteson came to Los Alamos in 2009 with extensive experience throughout the Mountain West and built a solid reputation at modest-budget public courses in Colorado and Oregon. But all the agronomic skill in the world cannot cultivate quality turf in the absence of adequate water supplies. And the slide in course conditions as the weather stays dry through the region just increases the pressure on golf course manager Steve Wickliffe as he tries to formulate a workable budget plan with county officials.
In its current form the course has little chance of boosting revenues. Turf conditions don’t allow it, and not only because there’s a shortfall of water. Even if there were enough water, the irrigation system doesn’t provide adequate coverage, given the way the pipes and spray nozzles were installed, so the layout, par-72, 6,695 yards from the back tees, remains run-down and perpetually underfed. It doesn’t help that for all of its natural beauty, there’s something about the routing that doesn’t make ideal use of the land. That’s because the holes don’t venture far out enough along the perimeter of the property to brush up against the most exciting terrain—the canyon edge. The result is a golf course that feels too tightly wrapped up on the inside, with not enough space for comfort between the holes.
There’s also that road, which is not something you simply leave behind when you finally duck into the parking lot. In the early days of the golf course, Diamond Drive was a dirt street that carried little traffic. Crossing it was easy when you headed to the back nine and returned for the last three holes. That has since changed dramatically, thanks to a road widening that impinged on the golf course. The long ninth hole, arrayed into the setting sun, lines you up into the oncoming eastbound lanes facing you on the slice side as you hit your tee shot and also as you play your second shot. A narrow tunnel—at least it’s wide enough for a golf cart—takes you to the tenth tee, but there’s that road again, this time on the left side.
There’s small solace here that the nearest traffic is in the same westbound direction as you play the par-4 tenth and par-4 thirteenth holes. If you yank a drive left, you’re likely to hit the back of a car, not the front windshield—unless of course you really clobber it way left into the approaching cars. On the long downhill par-3 fifteenth hole, the boundary issue isn’t a road but houses lined up close enough along the right side behind a little fence so that the last few home lots by the green regularly get bombarded by wayward approaches. From the fifteenth green you have to scramble madly across Diamond Drive—no tunnel here—to get to the sixteenth tee.
It’s not the most relaxing way to enjoy a round of golf. And I can’t help wondering how the maintenance crew, with equipment too wide to make it through the tunnel—manages to get its mowers and sprayers across the road without getting clipped by onrushing traffic.
A setting like this needs space. The golf holes need lots of room. Los Alamos is one of those golf courses that look great when you look up—at the crystalline sky, at the pines on the rim of the mountain to the north, and as you take in the long view south of the stark sedimentary rock outcrop and mesas.
You look up here, and you get inspired. You look down, and you get frustrated at the constraints the game suffers under. Even something as simple and basic as practicing is compromised here. Courses today without full-service practice ranges are at a big disadvantage. People like to work on their games, and if a range doesn’t have about 275 yards of length for full-bore shots and about 100 yards of width at the far end for dispersed shots to land, then you feel like you’re being jammed in, and the element of “play” is lost. And that’s the feeling you get on the practice range at Los Alamos, not only in terms of narrow teeing ground but also on the far end, where golf balls land.
In forty years of looking at golf courses, I have yet to see a range adequately protected by fencing and netting. Usually, the fence is too low, and the netting provides inadequate coverage so that golf balls sneak through. At Los Alamos they also simply fly over, onto the fairway of the par-3 fourth hole at the far end of the range and often, beyond that, onto the fairway of the parallel par-4 fifth hole as well. It’s a simple matter of geometry and topography. The net is only about 180 yards away from the practice tee, and it’s only about 30 to 40 feet high—easily within reach of a decently struck tee ball. It’s also slightly downhill from the tee to the far end. And at the thin air of 7,000-plus feet above sea level, golf balls rocket out. In what might be called a kind of invitation to an arms race, there’s a natural predilection in the face of netting, however distant, for golfers to try harder to hit it over. Call it “Parkinson’s Fifth Law”: driving range tee shots get longer in the face of efforts to contain them.
Aerospace engineers well versed in flight telemetry could figure out in seconds that an arrangement such as the one at this practice range is doomed to failure. Scientists are capable of measuring the heat, blast wave, and radioactivity of a bomb detonated three thousand feet below the earth’s surface. I take one look at the range without benefit of a slide rule or protractor and realize the golf course has a problem and a liability issue. Just to test it, I borrow a driver and a handful of balls from the pro shop to see how the range plays. I’m your average golfer, a 12-handicap, and am thrilled if I hit a tee shot 230 yards in the air. Despite sneakers, borrowed clubs, and lack of warm-up, I easily blast the balls over the fence. More worrisome is that when I retrieve the golf balls, I find two of them along the canyon rim, across two parallel fairways that run alongside the net. The course managers have a problem.
For all the limits and shortcoming of this golf course, however, I can imagine what is possible. Most golfers see a course only in the present. They play it, they engage it at a certain level, but rarely are they able to see through what’s there and imagine what’s possible. But I can envision the “after” and so am not as depressed by what I see as the “before.” And that’s exactly how I go around touring Los Alamos Municipal Golf Course. The setting is too good, the story too compelling, the larger narrative of golf up on The Hill too enticing to walk away from. If they can figure out how to build a nuclear weapon, they can surely fix up this place. And they won’t need another Manhattan Project to do so. But they will need some imagination. And they will also need to address some larger issues of the changing market around them. The long-term deterioration of the golf course didn’t happen in a vacuum.
In terms of increased competition from a regional golf boom, LAMGC’s issues are not unique. In fact, they are more or less consistent with a similar pattern across the country. Older, well-established, relatively debt-free facilities that flourished in the 1960s and 1970s increasingly found themselves going head to head against better built, more efficiently planned and outfitted golf courses that were better suited to the demands of today’s golfers. While newer golf courses with efficient irrigation, better turf quality, and better infrastructure were becoming available, LAMGC was suffering a withdrawal of capital and an overall decline in conditioning.
Subtle changes in the Los Alamos community exposed the susceptibilities of LAMGC and made it all the more vulnerable to advances by competing courses. In its glory days the golf course enjoyed popularity because it was part of a closed, insular community of highly educated, relatively wealthy scientists and their families. They were eager for recreation outside everyday laboratory life. That was especially the case before the town’s gates were opened in 1957 to give residents and lab employees greater access to Santa Fe. But it was years before the road into town was expanded, widened, and made safe enough for folks comfortably to make the trek down to the valley. By the time of the regional golf boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s, the journey to Santa Fe was an easy commute.
Life in Los Alamos has seen many cycles of boom and relative retrenchment. Immediately after deployment of the two atomic bombs ending World War II, there was a mass exodus of the initial first wave of scientists. To motivate the recruitment and retention of first-rate scientists, the AEC inaugurated the golf course. In the 1960s, following removal of the access gates, county officials also undertook a major effort at building up the town center in terms of shopping and entertainment so that residents would experience a more normal everyday life.
The strategic context of the lab’s work changed dramatically with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Efforts to move from underground nuclear testing ultimately led to a comprehensive test ban treaty and a shift in weapons research, from design, development, and production to carefully monitored arms reduction. Clinton-era spending reforms and cutbacks in defense-related investment led to workforce reductions and incentives to leave Los Alamos. One-third of all lab scientists in town retired in the period from 1991 to 1994. In many cases retirees opted to move out of Los Alamos. That meant that the residents most likely to play golf—retirees—declined as a percentage of the Los Alamos population. At its peak round count in 1996, LAMGC registered forty-six thousand rounds—a measure both of golf’s popularity in the Los Alamos region and of the lack of alternative facilities. Between 2000 and 2002 alone, some two hundred annual pass holders left the LAMGC. By 2011 the annual round count at Los Alamos Municipal had fallen by more than half and now hovered in the neighborhood of eighteen to twenty-one thousand rounds.
Unfortunately, maintenance conditions started to erode at LAMGC just as a crop of new facilities was popping up around Santa Fe, up and down the Rio Grande River Valley. There were now far more public golf options to be had, ranging from upscale, high-quality daily-fee courses on the north side of Albuquerque (Sandia Golf Course and Paa-Ko-Ridge Golf Club) to mid-tier, mixed-quality golf at Towa Golf Club, part of the Hilton Buffalo Thunder Resort & Casino on the north side of Santa Fe.
There had been a considerable loss of annual pass holders—many of whom played thirty-plus rounds a year and thus counted as valuable, repeat clientele. The opening in 2002 of nationally ranked Black Mesa Golf Club in nearby Espanola showed that even in remote north-central New Mexico, it was possible to build and draw attention to a quality public layout that made use of the stark native landscape. The course, designed by Baxter Spamm, gained a perennial spot in the top-100 on Golfweek’s Best Modern Course List as well as on Golf Digest’s Greatest Public Courses List. At a green fee in the range of $62 to $87, it was not wildly out of line with the LAMGC rate structure of $32 to $47 per eighteen-hole round.
But the development that just clobbered LAMGC was the opening in 1998 of the twenty-seven-hole municipal Marty Sanchez Links de Santa Fe. This four hundred–acre daily-fee facility on the west side of Santa Fe sits only forty-six miles, or one hour by car, from LAMGC and offers a well-manicured golf course and unimpeded long views of the rugged terrain above the Rio Grande River Valley. While not a great course, it is adequate, reasonably well groomed, and also designed for ease of maintenance, which helps keep costs down.
For everyday golfers the course has several obvious assets. It is easily accessible from downtown Santa Fe and from the region’s main north-south highway, Route 25. The Marty Sanchez course has the biggest practice area in the region as well as an attractive nine-hole par-28 short course that is ideal for juniors, newcomers, and retirees. And it has an expansive, comfortable clubhouse that serves basic golf fare. While the main eighteen-hole course could be stretched to 7,415 yards for championship play, it offers lots of teeing ground flexibility for everyday play. Most important, the course is affordable, with green fees set around $34 to $52 for walk-up play.
Small wonder that by 2011 the Marty Sanchez Links de Santa Fe was doing forty thousand rounds annually. That’s a considerable share of the area’s daily-fee play and a major drain on play from LAMGC. It also is a significant drain on highly profitable corporate and charity outings, many of which have fled downhill from the municipal course. Back in the 1960s, when the LAMGC was a focal point of social and sports life, the annual Atomic City Invitational Match Play Tournament sold out at 240 players, and activities associated with the event overfilled the clubhouse. It will not be easy to reclaim those heady days, not even with the planned new $5 million clubhouse.
A fundamental change in the tenor of county life took place in 2006, when day-to-day operations of Los Alamos National Laboratory shifted from the University of California to a consortium managed by the Bechtel Corporation. For decades town and lab life had been run along lines that focused on scientific vision and a shared community sensibility. While cost containment was always an issue, lab managers, working with federal agencies, were less concerned with the bottom line than with quality outputs and meeting scientific targets. Lab operations, and in turn the town’s tax base, were heavily subsidized by federal outlays.
When Bechtel took over, there was a palpable shift in the local commitment of upper-level management. At least half of them decided to live in the Santa Fe area and commute to work, rather than buy into life in Los Alamos. A great number of these executives were brought in on a temporary basis after serving overseas for Bechtel, primarily in the Middle East. Their emotional and cultural commitment to the lab and to Los Alamos was tempered somewhat by their working experience elsewhere. And even for those settling in for the long haul, the Santa Fe area offered a more attractive, more diverse lifestyle. And upper-tier managers who played golf migrated to the elite residential community of Las Campanas on Santa Fe’s west side. There they had the run of a thirty-six-hole private club designed by Jack Nicklaus.
It’s impossible to say how much capital was effectively withdrawn from the Los Alamos town center and the municipal golf course from these changes. But it’s clear that in some qualitative way, the shift in management culture introduced by Bechtel represented a decisive “tipping point” in leadership. Employees of the lab have long been famous for their engagement in all manner of voluntary social clubs, golf among them. Indeed, a league of laboratory employees has been a perennial feature of the patronage at LAMGC. But the shift in living patterns among employees in general and upper management in particular has created something of a loss of critical mass in the lab’s presence in everyday life. This change influences everything from the golf course to the tenor of commercial life in town.
While half of the lab’s employees now commute into Los Alamos from outside the county, the town center does not draw well from the outside community. Between a quarter and a half million people visit Bandelier National Monument annually, but the road there from Santa Fe takes visitors through the adjoining town of White Rock and not through Los Alamos. The town has a very limited mix of shopping, restaurants, and hotels that does not attract a potential tourist crowd.
I would occasionally spend an hour or two walking the streets there trying to get a feel for the place and coming up empty-handed, thanks to an architectural style that I can only describe as a kind of sanitized suburban sprawl. The busiest spots in town are the downtown Starbucks and an adjoining bagel shop, both of which fill up early each day with clienteles that are surprisingly diverse in terms of nationality, class, and lifestyle. Lots of runners and bicyclists congregate here, side by side with buttoned-down science nerds and more than a few loquacious elder gentlemen in various states of senescence.
There’s just enough evidence of counterculture here to make me feel hopeful I’m missing something crucial. Early one afternoon while trying to get a feel for the town, I pay a visit to the indoor recreational pool over at the Larry R. Walkup Aquatic Center. As I’m walking out the door trying to get my bearings, I fumble with a town visitor’s guide, paying more attention to the map I’ve unfolded than to what’s immediately around me. I all but bump into a small woman, and as I barely sidestep her and the bicycle she’s unlocking from the rack, she sees I’m trying to get oriented and asks if she can help me.
I hate any insinuation that I might be lost—years of therapy have yet to unlock that one. But I can’t fake my way entirely, and as she sees me looking around to square what I see with what’s on the map, she takes the opening and says something like, “I’m sure I can help you. I drew the map you’re looking at.”
Andrea Kron is her name, a petite, grandmotherly looking woman. She seems astonishingly fit for what I presume to be her age, though I’m too much the gentleman and not enough the reporter ever to ask her, even later, how old she really is. I can tell right away from her accent that she’s from the East Coast and Jewish, and I immediately think she’d be a great source of information about the town. But that will have to wait until after my scheduled meeting with an archivist in town.
Two hours later we meet up again, and we agree to explore an adjoining trail through what’s called Acid Canyon, which was a dumping ground for nuclear waste back in the 1950s. I’m assured it’s safe by now, or at least safer, and as we amble up and down the sloped, partially treed terrain for two miles or so, we come upon various federally administered cleanup sites. As I traverse some of the steep, demanding slopes, I come to understand that this trek is not for the casual walker and that the folks who regularly use these trails must be pretty serious hikers and in very good shape.
Along the way I learn that Kron came out west in 1979, when the lab hired her as a geologist to work on a geothermal initiative called Hot Dry Rock. Nine years later she left the lab and started her own business in cartography and did some contract work for the lab. All told, she seems to have held her own professionally—until the advent of geographic information systems (GIS) turned her trade upside down. Lately she’s taken to mapping hiking trails, such as the one commissioned by the local tourism board I had in my hands. Los Alamos, as I soon find out, is hiking crazy—there are trails crossing or running atop the rim of canyons all over the county. Hikers use them regularly, not just for recreation but also for commuting to work.
An eastward spur of the Acid Canyon trail takes us to a modest-looking building in the woods, the Los Alamos Jewish Center, where Kron has been a member since she got here. The door is unlocked. As we go in and look around, I learn that the congregation dates to 1954 and has steadily numbered about eighty in size—a small percentage, I would think, of the likely Jewish population in a town where Jews played a prominent role from the outset in the development of the atomic bomb. It’s certainly not for any rampant secularism here that the membership is so small.
The Jewish Center is one of twenty-four religious congregations in town, including Catholic, Jehovah’s Witness, Latter-Day Saint, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Unitarian. The one glaring exception is Muslim. There’s not a single mosque here, though there is a local online Muslim dating service. But the evidence of religious commitment in this town of highly educated people is pretty impressive. And I stand here for a few quiet seconds momentarily touched by the diaspora of a religion up here on The Hill. And I also can imagine the give-and-take that must go on in a small town as representatives of the three major Jewish strands—reform, conservative, and orthodox—negotiate their way through services and educational programming in what amounts to community effort without much hierarchy and without even a full-time rabbi in residence.
Back in town that evening I am trying to avoid my hovel of a hotel, though the experience confirms firsthand what I had heard about Los Alamos, namely that it is not exactly tourist friendly. I’m staying at the biggest hotel in town, a Best Western, and it feels like some modular construct glued together by civil engineers working from mismatched plans who could never quite agree on where to meet. In a town filled with bright engineers, this building should not have passed muster as an exercise by college sophomores. Even on the same floor, there’s one elevator for the even-numbered rooms and another elevator for the odd-numbered rooms, and to get from one side of the hotel to the other, you have to run through a maze of hallways. The hotel bar, one of a handful of establishments in town serving alcohol, has one large wall consisting of a cloudy plastic bubble that makes you feel like you’re drinking in a dirty fish tank.
I was advised that a new hotel out by the airport is marginally better. But I prefer staying closer in so I can at least consider walking around downtown. In any case it turns out there’s an explanation for the limited accommodations in town and the absence of an upscale place. A great number of visitors to town are on federal payrolls or subcontracts and thus subject to rigorous travel per diems. This tends to hold down the fees that hotels can charge—a considerable handicap to resorts and inns because the overwhelming majority of overnights are in the form of these consulting visits. An arcane county liquor law restricting bar activity and development to only seven licensees (two of them held by gas stations!) is another limitation.
Outside of the immediate historic lab district abutting Ashley Pond, the design and layout of the current downtown is clinically functional and unattractive. One conspicuous exception along Central Avenue is the modernistic glass and aluminum design of the Bradbury Science Museum, which showcases the history of lab undertakings.
Walking through the town’s collection of small box stores, I can’t help thinking how much more appealing Los Alamos might be if its layout encouraged pedestrian flow and sidewalk–street window life. Besides just being more interesting to look at and live in, the town could attract tourism dollars and more of the arts community that remains down in Santa Fe. For now Los Alamos feels like a town that is suspended between an oddly idyllic, exceptional past and the same kind of uncertain future facing most other towns in the United States.
It doesn’t take long to figure out that in many ways Los Alamos exists in its own sheltered world—as a kind of oasis or lost city in the sky surrounded by parched, unoccupied rocky desert. The drive up from Albuquerque consists mainly of barren rangeland, with no evidence of agriculture or even of ranching or cattle grazing. Much of the state is locked up by national forests or under the control of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. Large stretches are also held by the various Native American groups living on pueblos throughout New Mexico, many of which have now developed their own casinos. On a stretch of open land just north of Albuquerque on I-25, I spot a revealing billboard: “New Mexico Needs Doctors, Nurses, and Dentists.” An 800 number follows for those trained medical personnel who want to move to the state. Beyond that stands a roadside reminder of the scale of open space out here. A sign on the east side of the highway announces, “For Sale: 5,421 acres.”
Los Alamos County, on the other hand, is neither barren nor wide open. And in stark contrast to the state’s languishing poverty, Los Alamos sports some of the most impressive demographics of any county in the United States. A 2004 study by American City Business Journals ranked it as the best place to live in the country for quality of life.
The data show an unusually healthy, prosperous, and well-educated population. The county’s median household income of $99,578 in 2009 ranked fifth highest in the country and the highest west of the Mississippi River. In the same year only 2.9 percent of residents had incomes under the poverty line, compared to 19.4 percent for the whole state. In April 2010 the unemployment rate in Los Alamos was a mere 3.4 percent, less than half of the statewide figure of 7.4 percent. My sense of a healthy, well-exercised populace is borne out by data showing that Los Alamos has disproportionately low rates of adult obesity and adult diabetes compared to the state and the country as a whole. It surely helps that the people who live here don’t spend a lot of time sitting in their cars; the average commuter time to work is seventeen minutes, compared to twenty-eight minutes nationwide. My favorite statistic? Seventeen percent of the county’s adult population have PhD degrees, the highest rate in the country.
The numbers suggest a vibrant community. Indeed, Los Alamos is blessed with an extraordinary school system and readily available access to a vast range of recreational amenities. Among them are stunning parks and outdoor adventure to be had at Valles Calderra National Preserve and Bandelier National Monument, both of which are ideal for vigorous biking and hiking. There’s no shortage of hunting, fishing, and water sports in the area and excellent skiing on Pajarito Mountain. Within Los Alamos County there’s a linked, fifty-eight-mile-long trail network for casual hiking and biking within immediate access of downtown and surrounding neighborhoods. The extensive aquatic center accommodates both local families looking for some fun and elite athletes from around the world drawn to training in a high-altitude setting.
And then there’s the golf course. It has become obvious that LAMGC has languished for far too long. It’s now fallen behind its competitors and finds itself in a precarious position—thus the county’s decision in mid-2011 to hire golf designer Andy Staples for a detailed evaluation.
Staples, thirty-nine years old and based in Phoenix, is not a big-name designer. But as a lot of managers of modest golf course facilities have learned lately, you don’t need a marquee name (and accompanying big fee) when it comes to reworking the nuts and bolts of everyday golf courses. Staples is the kind of designer who is more interested in operational efficiency and community involvement in a fun golf course than in creating championship tests for PGA Tour pros.
He’s a modest, soft-spoken fellow who grew up in a small town outside Milwaukee. Staples studied landscape architecture at the University of Arkansas—this after a brief dalliance trying out for the Razorbacks varsity golf team. That’s when he found out that despite his 1-handicap, he just didn’t have what it would take to play competitively. “I didn’t have the killer instinct to know I could beat whoever I was going up against. And I really didn’t want to devote myself day-after-day to honing my game,” he says. “The coach told me I could either play golf or study. So I studied.”
While at school he spent two summers on a golf course construction crew, then followed this up after college working for a small Tulsa-based course architecture firm. In 1997 he went to work for a very busy northern California course design company run by industry veterans Robert Muir Graves and Damian Pascuzzo. It was there over the next six years, in an economy marked simultaneously by a golf construction boom and by demands for energy efficiency, that Staples learned to view golf courses in terms of resource management. In other words, he analyzes golf courses as users of electricity, fuel, water, and capital. It’s not a perspective I had thought much about until I saw a presentation he made about it in November 2010 at a workshop of the Northern California Chapter of the Golf Course Superintendents Association, where we were both on the program. Since then, we had been communicating, and I had liked the work he had done on Sand Hollow Golf Course in St. George, Utah, where he collaborated with designer John Fought on converting arid red sandstone into challenging golf ground.
Staples sees the golf course as an energy system, with some functioning efficiently and others functioning wastefully. The approach combines business model, bottom-line concerns about efficiency with sound ecological practice. For him “sustainability” has to do with the smart use of resources, including electricity, irrigation, and plant nutrition. His presentations to various Los Alamos County officials about the municipal golf course have focused on the need to make smarter, more efficient use of inputs. I am there to help him think about the local, cultural angle of what is—or ought to be—a valuable community resource for a report he’s preparing. So, we go around the golf course together, him looking at the ecology and infrastructure and me thinking about what the place says about its natural and social setting.
The bulk of Staples’s report to the county is supposed to document the golf course issues that need to be addressed: irrigation, turf quality, drainage, bunkers, safety, golf cart circulation, clubhouse, practice range, range parking, and access. The report is intended as an analysis and feasibility study, designed to precede any detailed architectural plans for renovating the golf course. The point is really to mobilize county officials and the community—the golf course management team as they tap into available redevelopment funds and the citizenry in order to develop a consensus among taxpayers, who ultimately will have to foot the bill.
Building such a consensus is never an easy matter because in Los Alamos, and in any community, only a small percentage of the population actually plays golf—usually around 10 percent. But of course only a modest percentage of residents use the walking trails or the community pool, and fewer than half have kids in the school system, and they have all of those amenities available. So, a case can be made for golf, if it makes good business sense and if it can be shown to be part of wider community involvement.
As Staples acknowledges to me during one visit, “There’s always the option of doing nothing” for the golf course, in which case it would simply continue its slow descent into decrepitude. The process might take a decade or more, by which time a newer generation of citizens and (potential) golfers would have simply given up on Los Alamos Municipal Golf Course altogether.
Staples tries out another idea on me, one that’s intended to develop distinct options. What he ingeniously calls “Plan A” is a modest proposal. It would entail a series of technical adjustments and improvements in the irrigation, turfgrass, and separation of existing hole corridors to reduce (but not eliminate) blatant safety concerns. The irrigation alone would take up half of the total cost of around $4.5 million. The rest of the money would be spent on a lined holding pond for water storage, tree work, extensive turf renovation, coring out and rebuilding bunkers, drainage work, and new netting around the range. Makes sense to me. However, as we both know it’s not at all clear that an investment of this level would ever be recouped, given that the golf course would still be limited by its basic routing and space constraints. It’s hard to know where the revenue stream would come from to pay for this $4.5 million investment.
So, he noodles around with “Plan B,” the more ambitious option. This one would call for a major overhaul, partial rerouting, a full-length practice range, view enhancement, and full resolution of safety issues, plus a new irrigation system, turfgrass program, and cart path trail. These improvements would be tied to a complete rebranding of the property—most significantly, an expansion of the golf course perimeter to bring a few new holes to the canyon rim. Doing so would have the double effect of making better use of the site’s natural features while expanding room at the core for a full-sized range. Total cost would be roughly double that of Plan A, in the area of $9 million.
A dramatic transformation along these lines wouldn’t just change the physical profile of the golf course. It would create a dramatically new course capable of competing on a statewide basis for tourists and draw people up from the Rio Grande River Valley. And that would allow for an enhanced revenue stream, something that would not be likely with Plan A.
As I think about these possibilities, I begin to lay out for Staples a whole new rebranding campaign for the golf course, one that would highlight its unique setting and character. He loves the name I came with for the golf course: Los Alamos National. It’s a play on a name that I normally think is overused, that of National, deriving from its first prominent use with Augusta National Golf Club, perennial home of the Masters golf tournament. But in the context of Los Alamos, National works perfectly because it foretells a reference to the famed Los Alamos National Laboratory, though it stops just short before saying so. The new name links golf with science in a dramatic setting and calls for a new logo, too.
The current logo for the course is a ridiculous wavy freeform scribble, allegedly depicting four pine trees atop a mountain ridge, though it actually looks more like an amateur hieroglyphic. In an effort to demonstrate the power of a good logo, and of a new name, Staples comes up with a stark iconography that would scan easily and reproduce well: two crossed golf clubs, with three curved energy vectors wrapping around them in different dimensions, over the words “Los Alamos National—Est. 1947.” That sparks my idea for a new marketing slogan: “Great golf in Los Alamos; the secret’s out.” Andy loves it. But will the town go for it?
It’s too good of an idea to let go, so we work on it over coffee one morning before another site visit. We figure the logo and the associated campaign would invoke the community’s tradition of scientific/atomic research. They would highlight the intensive, ecologically spare and energy-efficient operations of a golf course run on the lowest possible carbon footprint. They would emphasize the great scenic beauty of the golf course. They would showcase the facility’s history and role in the Los Alamos community. And they would help the community’s voluntary associations, church groups, and charities feel good about embracing the facility and using it for fund-raising outings.
Of course we know there’s no simple path to Los Alamos National. The investment would not make sense unless there’s a good chance the capital could be recovered in the long run through increased use and outside play. And it remains a very thorny issue in town whether the small impingement on existing trails needed for the new holes would be accepted by hikers. Of fifty-eight miles of existing hiking trails in town, the proposed new holes would require relocation of about 2,300 feet of trails—less than 1 percent but a dislocation nonetheless. We go back out there trying to fit golf onto the canyon rim, or at least near enough for it to make a difference without displacing the trail. Without those canyon rim holes the potential natural charm of the golf course takes a step or two back. Back to the drawing board for another attempt at rerouting.
I’m looking at a photo I took the first day I ever stepped foot onto Los Alamos Municipal Golf Course. The fellow, whose name I never got, is pictured astride the sixteenth tee with three of his golfing buddies. He’s a senior golfer, probably in his seventies, and he confirmed that he’s a retired scientist who worked for years at the lab. It’s a very hot day, just after Los Alamos has been reoccupied following the evacuation during the Bandelier National Monument Fire of July 2011. He’s wearing a soft-brimmed safari hat tied under his chin, a gray polo shirt, and bulging shorts held up by suspenders. He’s attached to a little breathing tube fueled by oxygen tanks holstered into the sides of his pants. And without any sense of absurdity, he’s smoking a cigarette.
I realize that I’m looking at a bomb—one that could go off at any moment. I think to myself, this guy is out of his mind. Or he’s a very clever scientist. If so, he’s too clever for my own good. Maybe he’s just on the verge of going crazy in his retirement. But I’ll bet that if he didn’t have his friends out here and access to Los Alamos Municipal Golf Course, he might actually go nuts. Sounds to me like a perfectly good reason for playing golf and for making sure that there’s a decent enough place to play for the next decade and more.