In the 1950s, the United States designed and built two competing offensive nuclear missile systems, Atlas and Titan. Here’s what these Cold War relics look like today, inside and out.
history under ground
The West
Atlas & Titan Nuclear Missile Bases
Colmor New Mexico
Colmor, New Mexico was founded in 1887 and abandoned in the 1960s. It missed the railroad. It missed the highway. It’s a dirt road kind of town.
Great Western
Sugar Mill
Longmont, CO
At a time when tariff laws, domestic manufacturing, and government regulation highlight every newspaper across the country, Longmont Sugar Factory marks a lesson to be learned.
Great Western Sugar Mill
Sterling, CO
How can a government create an entire industry with a tax? How does a factory turn a beet into table sugar? Can we learn about our cultural history by a ruined factory left far behind? Let’s practice some industrial archeology and stand in the place of ‘high-smellers’ past, reimagining these four brick walls in a national historical context.
Guadalupe Mesa Village
Cañyon Tapia, NM
Built in the 10th century and abandoned by the 14th, this is the oldest ghost town I have ever explored. It stands atop a desolate mesa in New Mexico in the shadow of an extinct volcano.
Milwaukee Road-Side Attractions of Montana
The Milwaukee Road cut through Montana with steel and electricity. It left behind depots, roundhouses, electrical substations, and even towns.
Mines of the Argo
Central City, Colorado
A Philadelphia doctor builds a 4-mile-long tunnel to drain hundreds of mines of ore and water. A crooked dentist turns Quartz Hill into a crater called The Glory Hole. Here is the stories of some of the mines connected to “The Mighty Argo” before a deadly mining accident closed most of the district down in 1943.
Snowstorm Gold Dredge Fairplay, CO
The Colorado Rockies are hiding a mountaintop shipwreck, The Snowstorm. All around us were snow-capped peaks… Bald Hill (11,500 feet), Palmer Peak (12,500 feet) and Pennsylvania Mountain (13,000 feet). We were going to do a […]
State Tuberculosis Sanatorium
San Haven, ND
North Dakota’s only public tuberculosis sanatorium served from 1912 to 1987. Since then it’s served thousands, but now it’s under demolition by neglect. What is that barbed wire hiding, anyway?
The Eagle Zinc Mine
Gilman, CO
Left hand, grip the left rail. Right hand, grip that other one. Feet, for God’s sake remember how to crabwalk; we have a cliff to descend. Come with me into the tunnels under a Coloradan ghost town to see what was once the world’s largest zinc mine.
Treasure Mountain Mine and Animas Forks
Colorado
Mother Nature refused to give up her gold in the San Juans to the men of Treasure Mountain without a fight. Now, after a century of hard rock mining in its steep gulches, she cannot let go of the long abandoned mines or its ghost towns.