Month: June 2024

This interesting phrase caught my eye when reading the other day. When I first read it, I found my brain automatically going to the laboratory. The Manhattan Project must’ve had an official “Los Alamos Organization & Procedure”, right? There’s probably a procedure manual on every desk today. Or, I suppose it’d be located on a hard drive these days. But surely LANL would need plenty of organizational procedures.

I’m sure they did and still do. But that particular phrase actually referred to something Fermor Church and Lawrence Hitchcock came up with to describe the summer camp at the Los Alamos Ranch School. In reading about the way camp was set up and run, I couldn’t help but contrast it to modern summer camp experiences.

The Three Trip Summer Camp

I’ve talked before about the big overnight pack trips at camp and at the Ranch School in general. In my post about the Los Alamos Diamond Hitch, I discussed plenty about the why of summer camps at Los Alamos. It was primarily financial. And honestly, a good bit of the “how” of summer camps at the ranch school can be credited to the structure of Boy Scouting. Scouting was really developing during that time and Connell required every summer camper to be registered for scouting. In 1919 Connell wrote a letter to one parent stating, “All of our boys are expected to become Scouts the first month of camp. I have just discovered…that [your son] is the only one who has made absolutely no effort to do so. I have told him that he will have to be prepared before tomorrow or he cannot go on the long trip.”

The “long trip” was the final camping trip of the summer camp season. A two week trek by horseback with pack train across the Espanola Valley to the Pecos. If you have ever looked at a map of our region, you might be able to imagine just how grueling that trip would be. On their return, the boys would stop in Santa Fe to enjoy a dance given by the Girl Scouts before heading back to the ranch school.

Scouting provided a list of necessary skills for outdoor survival, a method for learning them, and milestones to track progress. It also provided the ranking and organizational system that would become the heart of the Los Alamos Organization and Procedure.

Hard Life Lessons

Summer camp students, like school year students, were assigned to one of three patrols. Spruce Patrol was reserved for the older and more experienced boys. Pine Patrol was made up of boys with an intermediate range of skills. Fir Patrol was made up of young boys at least 12 years old and up. Patrols were assigned at the beginning of the camp season. From there, a ranking list would come out before each of the three trips. Between trips the boys would earn as many scouting awards and new skills as possible in order to get the best ranking prior to the upcoming trip.

Ranking lists could be changed during the pack trips depending on development and accomplishment of the boys. For the most part rankings determined who was boss of smaller groups within the patrol. There was a rank for everything, even who was boss between the two boys assigned to each tent. Jobs were assigned and lists were posted before the patrols left the ranch school on their trips. At the end of the summer, the staff would hand out awards based on attitude and accomplishments during the summer trips. Awards could be “best camper”, “cleanest tent”, best horseman, “best fisherman”, “best trail cook”, and so on. One kiddo got an award for “best camper” because Connell “bawled him out” all summer long and he never complained to staff, the other campers, or his parents. That sort of suggests what was valued in a camper. I wonder how modern teenaged boys would stack up?

Modern methods would suggest letting the boys “work out who is in charge” because we tend to hope that our kids develop leadership skills in a loosely structured environment. But then, “modern” methods would likely be shocked at the idea of sending 12 year olds with a group of twenty something fresh college graduates miles and miles over rough terrain via horseback where if someone got a snakebite it was likely to end in amputation of the limb at a minimum. There were no helicopter rescues, ambulances, or GPS beacons. If your child didn’t follow the rules, he was toast!

Motivational Pep Talks or Full Metal Jacket?

In 1942, Camper Bill Carson wrote home to tell his parents that during morning announcements, “every boy in the camp was told his faults and what he should do to improve”. AJ Connell was very vocal on his ideas that this was the ultimate way to change boys into men. How are men to improve themselves if nobody ever tells them what they’re doing wrong after all? Connell believed that selfishness was the worst fault a boy could have. Connell told the boys that selfishness was rampant in the world and it was their job to work against it.

Some of Connell’s comments seem right on. Others not so much. I think it’s difficult to digest some of these ideas because they’re from such a long time ago and a very different “world”. If my kiddo came home and told me of such a thing happening at school or at summer camp, I’d probably be on the phone to the director to ask why on earth someone was shaming my kid in public!

And yet, in 1930 Connell sent a young man home from summer camp and told his parents, “[Your son] has been…extremely disobedient, which has resulted in one accident, fortunately not as serious as it might have been. Against absolute orders plainly announced to all, and after being reminded by one of the boys, he insisted on trying to ride and jump a horse that was assigned to another boy, resulting in the horse kicking one of the boys and inflicting a painful injury. In a camp of this kind disobedience is dangerous.” Connell went on to add, “it is very seldom that I have dismissed boys from the camp…only…in cases where necessary for the protection and safety of the boys entrusted to me.”

Perhaps it’s tough to remember that a summer camp experience like the one offered at Los Alamos was a privilege for boys in the early 1900’s. It was the sort of privilege that had to be respected by following rules set out to protect everyone involved. Not just the boys, but the staff, the livestock, and the land.

In 1925 a former camper applied for a military commission in the early days of WWII. Ranch School Master Fermor Church sent camp records with a letter of recommendation that stated: “He made a very good camper and received valuable instruction in caring for himself and equipment under mountain conditions, in the New Mexico Rockies. The camp work stressed discipline, leadership, and general responsibility of both the individual and the group.” It’s such a simple statement without flowery language and yet what a reference in support of a young man who had goals of being in charge of a military unit!

Think about modern reality shows like “Survivor” or “The Amazing Race”. My belief is that the ranch school campers would’ve survived “Naked and Alone” far more successfully than the folks picked for that experience to date. Connell would’ve had them making loincloths out of moss and tree sap!

Lawrence Sill “Hitch” Hitchcock

It seems as though this hypothesis was proved true by a man the campers and students called “Hitch”. Pond and Connell recruited him from Yale where he’d just completed his bachelors degree. He was a Classics scholar, not an outdoorsman. In 1930 he attended the American School for Classical Studies in Rome. He came to the Los Alamos Ranch School because he thought the idea sounded exciting. I suppose you could probably consider him like one of the Greek classical heroes. Traveling to the ‘wild west’ from the ‘civilized’ East Coast area where he’d grown up.

From 1919 until 1943 Hitch taught most of the classes at Los Alamos. His teaching passion was always Latin and he served as headmaster from 1927 until 1943. Once the job at LARS was no longer available due to the Manhattan Project, Hitch went into full time military service. Pond and Connell had always encouraged their school masters to continue their education. After beginning at LARS, Hitch got a masters degree in 1936 in Classics, also from Yale. He studied at the University of Chicago, and he was in the US Army Training Corps and the Army Reserves. That East Coast boy embraced everything the West had to teach him and kept going in the best of ways!

Eventually Hitch continued to be critical to just about everything. He was an Army Colonel and eventually served as the Army Secretary General for a time. He was part of the Inter-American Defense Board and the CIA. He even helped to supervise the construction of CIA headquarters at Langley! Plus, he was a board member of the Los Alamos Foundation from 1940 to 1973 because, as most of us locals have figured out, Los Alamos gets under your skin and becomes an intrinsic part of who you are.

The Real Traditions of Los Alamos

I think what has begun to fascinate me is the long standing tradition of education, outdoor enjoyment, tenacity, resilience, and passion that have always been part of this place. Our modern minds tend to focus so closely on the LANL part of our history. But people have been drawn to this area since before the first settlers in Frijoles Canyon started living in and around the ruins we now call Bandelier. Los Alamos challenges us. And maybe sometimes these challenges change over the years, but they still exist and they still bring us to this place where a good number of us fall in love with the region and never want to leave!

If Los Alamos is calling your name, give me a call! I’m a hometown girl who loves all of the unique and sometimes unexpected things that come with life in Los Alamos. I’d love to chat real estate and life on the Pajarito Plateau with you! If you’d like to read more about the history of the Ranch School, my quotes come directly from John D Wirth and Linda Harvey Aldrich’s book, “Los Alamos: The Ranch School Years 1917-1943”. You can find it at the Historical Society’s website or in the museum at Fuller Lodge. If you haven’t been there, please stop by and visit!

As the parking lot in front of our Re/Max First office fills with out of state license plates, I’ve been continually surprised by the distance which some folks travel to come play tourist in our very remote city on the hill. Not that all out of state cars belong to tourists. We have quite a variety of residents here in Los Alamos. I’ve worked with buyers from cities on almost every continent at this point. Our National Laboratory recruits minds from all over the globe in the name of scientific collaboration. But post docs, visiting scientists, and guest lecturers don’t generally have the same look as your run of the mill tourist.

Sure. Tourism here in Los Alamos got a boost from the recent Oppenheimer film. But I started thinking about tourism in general. When I was reading some research materials for last week’s blog post about Camp Hamilton, I ran across a reference to something called the “See America First!” campaign. This campaign was said to have helped the original owner/operator of Camp Awanyu (later Camp Hamilton) grow his business offering automobile tours of the Pajarito Plateau. So, I started looking around for what this “See America First!” campaign was all about.

Turns out it isn’t necessarily called that. The campaign was more of a movement, and the timing was heavily influenced by the Panama-California (also called Panama Pacific) Exposition in 1915. The Exposition was a 600 acre fair that covered 2.5 miles of San Francisco waterfront to celebrate the completion of the Panama Canal. But that’s on the West Coast. In the early 1900s a LOT of our population was mostly centered on the East Coast and in the South.

The OTHER thing going on was the expansion of a National Highways and Byways system. Most of us are familiar with Route 66. We also see plenty of signs in the Santa Fe area about the National Historic Roadways or National Historic Trails because the Santa Fe Trail is a pretty big deal in American History, right? In 1912, The National Old Trails Road, also known as the Ocean-to-Ocean Highway. It was 3,096 miles long and stretched from the New York City/Baltimore, Maryland area to San Franciso, California. Eventually this “official” roadway was decommissioned and the Western portion became part of Route 66. Looking at the map below (you can find a version of this map HERE), it becomes pretty obvious why Camp Awanyu and the Pajarito Plateau became a great place to stop and see the wild and beautiful scenery of the Southern Rocky Mountains. There’s literally nothing else around!

Something else that drives tourists up the winding switchbacks of our Main Hill is the very long habit of people living in the US to plan domestic vacations. If you spend much time talking to folks from outside the US, you’ll find that they take their “holidays” in countries other than their own. When Americans leave the Lower 48, it seems like they’re usually headed to Alaska or Hawaii. A lot of that has to do with timing and geography. The United States is HUGE! You could spend a lifetime traveling inside our borders without seeing it all. Many Americans never bothered with a passport and plenty of Americans have lived and died in this country without ever having one.

I was rather surprised to learn that part of the “See America First!” campaign was literally designed to make that a long standing American tradition. According to Marguerite Schaffer’s book, “See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880-1940”, there was a growing trend of “upper middle class” folks having enough time and income to travel. As you can imagine, it became a concern of railroad owners, car makers, and domestic businesses that Americans would use their leisure time and money to travel to Europe. A marketing campaign got rolling and then the Parks Service got involved in 1920 when advertising began to convince the general public that National Parks were also a National Asset.

Considering Los Alamos is a small town literally stranded in the middle of three enormous National Parks, I suppose WE are also a National Asset. Not that any of us had a doubt…

This idea of traveling within the continental United States was said to promote nationalism and a sense of American identity. But the widespread ownership of cars took that concept to the next level! Instead of going on a train to a specific destination, driving your own car to a vacation destination allows you to experience a new place in unique ways. You see parts of the rural countryside you’d never see if you were headed to a train station. The same holds true for air travel. Have you ever “flown through” a city without actually experiencing any of the local flavor? It’s hard for us to imagine what it would have been like to have NEVER driven your own car through a rural town or viewed sights like the wind turbines and oil rigs all over Texas and Oklahoma from the window of your family car or van.

Put in this context, it seems obvious that a place like Camp Awanyu would become a hot vacation destination in the early 1900s. It must have been like a trip to Mars for those East Coast visitors. Riding in an open seven passenger vehicle up the twisting road to Buckman Mesa before climbing all over prehistoric ruins? I can’t begin to imagine how cool that must’ve been! Probably just a shade cooler than it is now.

Visitors and tourists come to Los Alamos everyday, but some of us have the opportunity to enjoy everyday life here in Los Alamos! When you’re ready to chat about buying or selling your dream home in Los Alamos, give me a call!

There’s a lot of talk in town about Camp May. I did a post on it a few weeks ago and you can visit that HERE. But Camp May wasn’t the only staging area used by the Los Alamos Ranch School for fun outdoor adventures. Camp Hamilton was more well known by the boys than Camp May and the cabin at Camp Hamilton eventually became part of the Ice House during the Manhattan Project. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

If you Google Camp Hamilton and Los Alamos you’ll find dozens of references to trails. A connecting trail, the Ranch School Trail, the Camp Hamilton Trail, and even the Tent Rocks Trail which intersects with the Camp Hamilton Trail at one point and has an interesting and entwined history with Camp Hamilton. The existing Camp Hamilton Trailhead is located down near the county maintenance buildings on Camino Entrada. From here you can still hike down to the remains of the old cabin which used to play such a huge part in the Ranch School Boys’ introduction to life on the Pajarito Plateau. The actual remains of the cabin sit on the southern edge of the decommissioned Bayo Canyon Wastewater Treatment Plant.

Camp Hamilton wasn’t called that to begin with. It was Camp Awanyu. The man who obtained the first land leases for that beautiful spot in lower Pueblo Canyon is known as F. Coomer. Nobody knows what F stands for, but the man did quite a booming business with his Rocky Mountain Camp Company. At that time, the West was becoming a popular vacation destination. Beginning in the first few decades of the 1900s, the “See America First” Campaign was being advertised to Americans nationwide. Automobiles were becoming more common. Folks were starting to travel. And the Rockies became a popular place to visit!

Coomer guided travelers and tourists through the Pajarito Plateau’s beautiful scenery using cabins like the one he built at Camp Awanyu as staging areas. One of the things that made his location such a great starting point is the same reason so many of our still popular trails cross each other within just a few miles or yards of each other in that area. The local collection of tent rocks, Tsankawi, and the Buckman Mesa were very popular geographical features with tourists in the 1900s just as they are today. Coomer utilized seven passenger vehicles to cruise through the canyons and show his guests the amazing West.

When Coomer gave up the tour business in 1926, the parents of a Los Alamos Ranch School student named Sam Hamilton donated enough money for the school to buy out Coomer’s land lease and renovate the cabin. The ranch school added a kitchen, a stone fireplace, and a window with a view down the canyon. Because of it’s accessibility by car, it’s location in the midst of the Ponderosa Pines and the closeness to other trails, sites, and ruins, the ranch school began using Camp Hamilton as a place to introduce new students to life on the Pajarito Plateau.

Many of the younger boys just starting school didn’t have much experience with riding. They couldn’t tie a diamond hitch or balance a pack pannier. They needed some time to be introduced to outdoor skills that would become the backbone of their success at LARS. Camp Hamilton became just that.

This doesn’t mean the older boys didn’t find Camp Hamilton useful. There were several older students who used Camp Hamilton as a base camp to study and photograph nearby ruins and geographical features. While the older boys were at Camp Hamilton, they often acted as camp counselors, cooking, cleaning, and helping to introduce their younger schoolmates to outdoor life. The older boys would generally come down from the ranch school by horseback utilizing what we now call the Ranch School Trail.

If you have the chance, hike the Camp Hamilton Trail or the Ranch School Trail in order to check out the incredible views. It’s so cool to see solid evidence of the amazing can do attitude of the Los Alamos Ranch School boys! Several stacked stone retaining walls still hold the trail in place on narrow ledges and in several areas deep grooves had to be cut into the volcanic tuff using picks and other hand tools. The trails are considered to be some of the oldest purpose built equestrian trails in the region and were intentionally created using switchbacks to allow pack animals to pass up and down.

The cabin certainly doesn’t look today as it did when the boys were enjoying it. Some trail bloggers have declared it to be in “deplorable condition”. A good portion of it was salvaged to build the Ice House during the Manhattan Project era. But the current condition of the cabin doesn’t negate the wonderful history of that area. A place where young students of the Los Alamos Ranch School learned to live, work, and play in the unforgiving conditions on the Pajarito Plateau.

Nowadays, Camp Hamilton can serve a similar purpose to those who hike down for a peek and a few gorgeous photographs. Life in Los Alamos is soaked in history, scenery, and unique experiences! So when you’re ready to join our unique community, give me a call. I’m a hometown girl who loves to chat about real estate in Los Alamos!

Looking for more info on Camp Hamilton? I’ve enjoyed Sharon Snyder’s blog post for the Los Alamos Historical Society HERE. You can also find some excellent trail descriptions from the Los Alamos Woods Wanderer HERE.