At the site of the Los Alamos Ranch School Ice House, blocks cut from Ashley Pond were stored when winter ice reached a foot in thickness. The original log building was replaced in the mid-1920s by a stone structure. During the Manhattan Project, the building's cool interior was used by technicians to assemble the core of "the gadget," the test plutonium bomb, before it was transported 200 miles south to the Trinity Test Site. In the early 1950s, Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, now Los Alamos National Laboratory, opened a museum here dedicated to preserving the Lab's history. The building was razed in 1957, and in 1966 a memorial combining the log and stone styles of the earlier buildings was erected using some of the original stone.

Photo: James Hulse

Photo: James Hulse

Los Alamos, New Mexico · USA