This building is on Route 50 at the western edge of Delta, Utah. It may not look like it, but it’s an important building.
It is the headquarters of the Telescope Array project, a collaboration of researchers from the U.S., Japan, Korea, Russia, and Belgium, formed to study the impact of cosmic rays on the earth’s atmosphere.
“Cosmic rays” are not rays at all, but particles that were once part of an atom. The Millard Cosmic Ray Center detects a specific type of particle, called an “ultra-high-energy cosmic ray,” thought to be the nucleus of an iron atom. These particles have traveled at very high speed to arrive at our planet from up to 160 million light years away. They are extremely rare — a similar cosmic ray installation in Argentina, observing over 1,100 square miles of the earth’s surface, detected the arrival of just one such particle every four weeks.
The project in Utah is the largest such observatory in the northern hemisphere. It has been collecting data since 2007 using detectors placed in the nearby desert. Some are positioned in a triangle roughly 19 miles on a side, while others are spread across an additional 300 square miles.
These instruments detect two manifestations of cosmic rays: very faint flashes caused when arriving particles hit gas atoms in the earth’s atmosphere, and also the result of such a collision — a cascade of other particles called an “air shower.”
Heading west out of Delta, Route 50 passes southeast of the research area.
From September 1942 to October 1945, 11,000 individuals of Japanese ancestry — the majority American citizens — were involuntarily moved to the Topaz War Relocation Authority Camp. The camp was about fifteen miles northwest of Delta, Utah. These photos show the site of the camp as it exists today.
Most of the internees were from the San Francisco Bay Area. They were sentenced, without trial, to live in a remote area where daytime summer temperatures climbed above 100 degrees and nighttime winter temperatures could drop below minus 20.
Entire families were relocated and assigned to live in rickety barracks, which used tar paper for insulation. “Block 4,” shown in the photo above, was one of thirty-four “residential blocks” at Topaz. Each residential block included twelve barracks, each one divided into six apartments. Some of the barracks were unfinished when people arrived, lacking, for example, actual windows to fill the window openings.
Each block also included latrines for men and women, a recreation hall, a mess hall, and four showers for men and four bathtubs for women. People lived in these conditions for three long years, until late 1945.
Between 110,000 and 120,000 people were held at camps such as Topaz. During the 1980s, the U.S. government passed legislation authorizing a payment of $20,000 in reparations to each survivor of internment. President George H. W. Bush made a formal public apology.
Those steps followed a government report titled Personal Justice Denied, which found little evidence of disloyalty by American citizens of Japanese descent and concluded that banishment to the camps was the result of racism. At the time, however, each individual had to find a way to cope with what was happening.
One of those individuals was Chiura Obata, who before relocation was a faculty member in art at the University of California, Berkeley. During his internment, he drew on his professional experience to organize an art school, shown below, at which sixteen instructors taught over 600 students.
Obata himself painted throughout his internment. His work from that time was displayed recently in the exhibition “When Words Weren’t Enough” at the Topaz Museum, at 55 Main Street, Delta, Utah, on Route 50. The painting shown just below was painted on October 9, 1942, less than a month after Obata arrived at Topaz.
How could he do it? How could he paint works such as these and at the same time create an art school, while dislocated to an unforgiving environment far from the familiarity of his home and career?
Here’s what he said:
“In any circumstance, anywhere and anytime, take up your brush and express what you face and what you think without wasting your time and energy complaining and crying out. I hold that statement as my aim, and as I have told my friends and students, the aim of artists.”
– Chiura Obata, 1946, quoted in Topaz Moon
The Topaz War Relocation Authority Camp, by Chiura Obata
Great Basin National Park is south of Route 50 in eastern Nevada. There you will find both Wheeler Peak and Bristlecone Pines.
At 13,065 feet, Wheeler Peak dominates the area around Route 50 near the Utah border. There is a glacier near the summit, although, as a result of climate change, how much longer is not clear.
Inside the park, you can drive up the side of Wheeler Peak, with views of the valley below.
If you’re hardy enough, continue to the highest parking lot, get out of your car, and hike. At about 10,000 feet, you’ll reach the Bristlecone Pine grove.
Bristlecone Pines are the oldest known individual life forms on earth, and the minute you step into the grove, you’ll be in the presence of living things that are more than 3,000 years old.
These trees grow longest in harsh environments, which is one reason why the oldest members of their species live high up in Great Basin National Park (and also at the top of the White Mountains of California, near the town of Bishop).
Given their longevity, it’s not surprising that Bristlecone Pines attract the attention of scientists, and this led to an unfortunate outcome.
In an effort to more fully understand how these trees have survived, in 1964 a scientist selected a tree in the Great Basin grove and …
Cut. It. Down.
It turned out the tree was more than 4,900 years old.
There was no vandalism involved in this act, and the actual age of the tree was not known until it was evaluated after it was cut down. Still, consider how it would be to know you had killed a living thing that was almost 5,000 years old.
When the seed of that tree sprouted, Gilgamesh was alive, the Great Sphinx was being constructed, weaving looms were just being invented, and the very first iron objects were being made.
When the seed of that tree sprouted, it was more than 1,000 years before Stonehenge became a cultural center; more than 1,500 years before Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt; more than 2,000 years before Beijing was founded in China; more than 2,500 years before Sophocles wrote plays in Greece; and 3,000 years before Julius Caesar conquered Gaul.
Today, the oldest Bristlecone Pines are not identified to the general public, but if you visit Great Basin National Park, you can sit quietly, surrounded by trees you know are more than 3,000 years old.
What’s more, you can run around and touch the young trees in the grove. If climate change doesn’t do them in, you will have touched living things that may still be alive in the year 5,000.
The Ward Charcoal Ovens are off U.S. Highway 50, east of Ely, Nevada. They were built in 1876, and the charcoal they made was used to smelt silver ore in the nearby town of Ward (now a ghost town).
When mining in the area was at its peak, the silver smelters in Ward required 16,000 bushels of charcoal a day. Wood is the raw ingredient of charcoal, and these ovens are 30 feet high. Filling just one of them required over five acres of trees, completely stripping hills and mountains up to 35 miles away.
It all came to an end in the early 1880s, as the silver veins ran out and a substitute was found for charcoal. The ovens operated for less than a decade.
The ovens still remain, though, in Ward Charcoal Ovens State Park. They are so big you can walk inside them.
Ely was a stagecoach stop in its early days. It became a mining town after copper was discovered nearby in 1906. Since then it has experienced the booms and busts typical of mining communities.
Copper mining has done well by Ely lately, though, giving the town enough resources for cultural developments. This little park on Route 50 in downtown Ely includes a large sculpture made, appropriately enough, from mining tipples. Tipples are used to direct something that’s mined into, say, railroad cars.
Of course, gambling is legal in Nevada. The Hotel Nevada, on Route 50, houses one of Ely’s casinos. The building is six stories high, and from the time it opened in 1929 into the 1940’s, it was the tallest building in Nevada.
Huge mountains of waste rock loom over Ruth, Nevada, in the Robinson Mining District.
Miners have removed the rock to uncover copper ore (and that of other metals) so it can be mined, as shown in this photo of a mining pit at Robinson.
There are three Robinson District mining pits, all on Route 50 just west of Ely, Nevada. They are being worked by a Polish company, KGHM Polska Miedz, the latest of a string of owners who have come and gone as metal prices and mining technology have made ore extraction here more or less profitable.
The district is named for Thomas Robinson, a prospector who discovered gold, silver, and copper here in 1868. Gold mining was unsuccessful in the late 1800′s, and serious copper mining began in 1907. Today the district yields 120 million pounds of copper and 75,000 ounces of gold a year.
The mining industry can estimate the probable life of a mine given its current extraction rate. As of 2016, and using today’s mining technologies, Robinson is roughly halfway through its productive life.
Nevada includes a geographic area called “basin and range,” characterized by narrow mountain ranges separated by dry valleys, called basins. This topography results in Route 50 views such as those in these photos.
One explanation of basin and range topography is that the crust of the earth in this area is gradually expanding and therefore thinning. This type of geologic change proceeds very slowly, so you have plenty of time to decide whether you agree.
Much of Nevada is also in an area called the Great Basin, which includes parts of Utah, Oregon, and California, as well as, of course, Great Basin National Park. Because of the geography of the Great Basin, water that falls out of the sky and into it can not reach any ocean.
