Winter Desert Road Trip 2002

When: December, 2002

Categories:

Mojave Airplane Parking Lot

Driving to Trona Pinnacles

Trona Pinnacles

Searles

Panamint Valley

Darwin Canyon

Olancha-Darwin Road

Saline Valley

Death Valley - Ubehebe Road

Death Valley - Racetrack Valley

Bonnie-Claire Playa

Driving North on Highway 95

Granite Springs Valley

I visited this location in person after spotting a series concentric circular roads on my DeLorme Gazetteer map. Since then, I have found via SmugMug user AAIR an airliners.net post which theorizes that this place was set up for a nuclear bomb test:

There is an underground nuke test site on open land in northern Nevada. According to a geologist friend of mine it was never 'shot' because it was located on the end of a faultline. It is just as well. The shaft was only 30 miles from Lovelock and 22 miles from Nixon.

The site is located in either Copper Valley or Granite Springs Valley (hard to tell) about 12 miles north of Interstate 80. It is visible to aircraft flying J32-94 just north of the airway just southwest of LOL. You can identify it from the concentric roads in the desert around ground zero. The last one appears to have been 20km from zero.

SmugMug user AAIR further adds, "The current hypothesis is that this was (one of?) the site(s) that was going to be used for Project Gondola (not be confused with Project Pre-Gondola series of chemical explosive, single-charge catering experiments in Montana), part of Operation Plowshare, but was cancelled after the problems run into with Project Faultless."

Here are some ruins near the center of the concentric circles at Granite Springs Valley. I didn't have the benefit of Google Earth satellite photos to help me find the true center (which is at 40.0129, -119.0015 ), but these foundations were less than a half mile west of the center:

Granite Springs Valley - Bluewing Flat Playa

Heading West to Black Rock Desert

Map