Project Faultless on the Road to Tybo
- Ian
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
When you're rolling across the wide open desert of central Nevada in early January, alone doesn't begin to describe the feeling. It's all cracking fence posts and rusty barbed wire. The few man-made sites you do pass are all marked keep out, no trespassing, or Property of the United States Govt. My day had begun hours earlier camping near some hot springs miles outside of Mammoth Lakes, California. I had stayed there for a few days after repeated storms blanketed the area with feet of powder.
The serene white landscape was painted warm shades of gold and pink as the sun rose, wind whistling around the camper as I rolled down the highway headed east. I had to make good time that day to make it back on schedule. I also knew I would be passing fairly close to Tybo, a ghost town so remote that few people know it exists. I couldn't drive by without stopping, the wild mustangs between Tybo and I guaranteed that.
The frozen silence of the morning gave way as I dropped down the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada mountains and into the foothills. The community of Benton sits just shy of the Nevada state line, its hot springs giving off a hint of steam at the edge of town. Seeing an old stucco storefront, I couldn't help but wonder how lively it was in its heyday. I wished I could stop and dig in to the history of Benton, but I had miles to cover. Beyond town loomed Boundary Peak, ushering me out of the state. At over 13,000 ft, it was Nevada's highest. Soon after that, the trees thinned and shrank until there was nothing left but bare rock and sagebrush.
Zooming across the desert, many hills were rolling and bare, and some were anchored by larger mountains. There weren't even signs of remote ranches around any longer. I would see maybe a few vehicles an hour. Beyond them, it was just looming desert peaks reminding me more of another planet than the earth I knew.
I rolled for another fifty miles, through volcanic hills and beneath the Monte Cristo mountains. Then I came to Tonopah, a former mining boomtown with a few thousand people still living there among the gas stations and Clown Motel. Their main employer was no longer the mines, but the Tonopah Test Range. On my way out of town, I cruised past its worn-looking entrance with an old missile atop a sign, it was the visible edge of Area 52, whose more famous neighbor, Area 51, sits about 70 miles to the southeast.
Sandia Laboratories founded the range in the late 1950s under an agreement with the Atomic Energy Commission, originally to test ballistics and non-nuclear features of atomic weapons. As I drove by, I wondered if a geiger counter would show any radiation. The whole range covered over 500 square miles of land, and was relatively quiet for two decades before the US Air Force came knocking. They needed a place to test a new kind of plane, the first stealth plane, the F-117 Nighthawk.
Lockheed's infamous Skunk Works division developed the plane from their Have Blue concept plane. The Have Blue had won the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) competition in the summer of 1975 for "demonstrating unmatched low observability" according to Lockheed. In other words, a plane that radar couldn't see. Lockheed was then awarded a production contract for the stealth plane, and they realized they needed a more isolated airfield to test and evaluate the new aircraft. Tonopah Test Range was their chosen spot.
In 1979, the existing 6,000ft runway was lengthened to 10,000ft and plenty of concrete was added to create an apron and taxiways. A year later, the next phase of construction began. This included more concrete and hangars, along with a control tower and dining facilities. By the early 1980s the runway had been extended to a length of 12,000 feet and Tonopah Test Range had become a real military base to house the Nighthawk. Unfortunately as I passed the range that day, I couldn't see any sort of advanced aircraft flying test flights overhead.
Past the range, the monotony resumed. Tumbleweeds, whipping winds, and dust were my companions as I rolled down the highway. Eventually, I saw some dark specks off the highway near Saulsbury Summit. I pulled over quickly to grab my binoculars. Leaning on the hood, I watched a small herd of wild mustangs graze on some sparse grasses beneath the shadow of the mountain. They moved slowly, heads down, save for the sentry animal posted at the edge of the herd as a lookout.
As I inhaled the fresh air tinted with sage and lowered the binoculars to look at the animals with a naked eye, something bright white caught my attention down the highway. Getting a closer look, I could hardly believe it. Four white mustangs were off on their own together, clearly visible against the sagebrush. A single white horse is usually a rare sight, but four together was astounding. I later found out that the "Stone Cabin Greys" are known in the area as mustangs that are usually born black and then gradually grey out as they age, with only a small minority eventually losing their dark mane and tail as well. These animals likely had some Stone Cabin Grey in them yet, these had shed every trace of darkness.
The lineage of the grey horses is from Steel Dust, a grey Quarter Horse with thoroughbred blood from Texas who was released wild into the area after a racing career in the 1840s. The stallion thrived in the arid environment and ran with the mustangs for years. According to American Wild Horse Conservation, the steel dust line of horses is one of the foundational genetic lineages of today's Quarter Horses. Thoroughbreds are bred for the track, not the desert, which makes his success in central Nevada a testament to the hardiness of his lineage.
After watching them for another 15 minutes or so, I kept rolling further into the desert. I couldn't believe what I had seen. I felt as if I had been blessed on my journey in some way by those wild mustangs. Eventually, I wrapped around the southern terminus of the Hot Creek Range, coming up on my turn down the road towards Tybo.
When I turned off highway 6 and onto the road to the ghost town, I was immediately surrounded by faded government buildings and more signs that made me feel like I shouldn't be there. Looking through the fence, I could see that there were housing units, shops, and a large airfield as well. For the middle of nowhere, the government had built quite the airfield. I made a mental note to look into the site later on.
As it turns out, those facilities out on the road to Tybo were originally constructed for the use of Project Faultless, a nuclear test project. In the late 1960s, the Atomic Energy Commission was searching for a second nuclear testing site, a place to test the big stuff. They settled on the area near Tybo, Nevada for its remote location, but first they needed to test the ground to see if it was suitable. To accomplish this, a 3,275 foot deep hole was drilled, and they lowered a nuclear weapon with a yield of approximately 1 megaton to the bottom. That weapon had roughly 65 times the amount of energy as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
When the 1 megaton bomb was detonated, the ground heaved up 15 feet before settling back down 10 feet below where it began. The force opened up two small fault lines nearly a mile apart on either side of ground zero. The 7.5 foot diameter tube that marked the top of the hole had been flush with the earth when the test began. Now it protruded from the ground over 9 feet. Windows shattered at the high school in Ely, Nevada, nearly 90 miles away. Needless to say, the Project Faultless test did indeed have its faults, literally and figuratively.
The government decided to take its tests elsewhere for larger bombs, deeming the area around Project Faultless too unstable even for nuclear weapons, ironic. The tube is still there today, if you want to go see it for yourself. While the ground is contaminated, surface levels are allegedly safe, just don't collect any soil or rocks from the site! Next time, the journey continues into the ghost town of Tybo, Nevada, a town with mines so complete they could have been working recently.
Sources:
AWHC Contributor. (2020, June 19). Herds Across The West: Stone Cabin Wild Horses . American Wild Horse Conservation . https://americanwildhorse.org/stories/herds-across-the-west-stone-cabin-wild-horses-7420
Department of Energy Legacy Management . (n.d.-b). Fact Sheet: Tonopah Test Range, Nevada, Site. Grand Junction .
F-117A: Tonopah Test Range (TTR). www.f-117a.com. (n.d.). http://www.f-117a.com/Tonopah.html#:~:text=History,operating%20for%20nearly%20two%20years.
Lockheed Martin . (n.d.). F-117 Nighthawk. Lockheed Martin. https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/news/features/history/f-117.html
Project Faultless. Forgotten Nevada . (2020, June 6). https://forgottennevada.org/sites/faultless.html
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