Welcome to the Party, Pal!

When I went to the States a few years back, visiting Los Alamos, New Mexico (nuclear physics lab where the Manhattan Project was developed), our team went via Boston and Albuquerque(we didn't make a wrong turn there), from Oxford.

I will never forget it, not because of the history or the physics, but the weather. We had to change at Boston, and it was Winter.

Our transfer plane was held up as we waited aboard. The reason? They had to literally hack the ice from the wings.

Luckily I was in a central window seat and I was able to watch the airport staff. The ice had accumulated during the short while between it landing, and us getting aboard.

When we arrived in Albuquerque (no, we still didn't make a wrong turn) it was a little warmer. We hired a car to take us the for the last leg. Four hours later, we arrived at the lab, and being a newbie, I had to do the first night shift.

We were there for the carbon-14 beam. Smashing them into targets of Ruthenium, Moybdenum and Cadmium. My job was to monitor the things as we detected the Oxygen-16 coming out of the targets.

The night shift might have been lonely for some people, but I kept myself busy by trying to figure out how to make things more efficient. I like to do this.

Dead of night. Just me in the control room, and the operator in the operations room, controlling the enormous accelerator.

The silence was deafening.

Then it started to snow (Los Alamos has an elevation of 13,000 feet, and water boils at 79 degrees C, not 100).
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And it kept on snowing. The lab is quite a bit higher than the town.

And it kept on snowing.

And snowing.

By 5 am I was snowed in , with three foot of snow outside, with six foot drifts against the doors.

Alone and isolated.

So I started to laugh. It was soooo funny.

My shift should have finished at 6 am. They didn't get to me until 10 am. It was a buzz.

When I awoke back in the hotel at 5 pm, what I saw was astonishing (to me, anyway). The snow had almost gone, but in an interesting way. It was subliming.

Los Alamos is actually in the middle of a desert, and the air is so dry there that the snow did not melt, it just evaporated!

We returned via Los Angeles and actually passed over Greenland on the way.

Ten bonus points if you work out why I have a picture of Die Hard 2.