Albuquerque, NM
Shared civilian/military field — the civilian side is the Sunport, the south side is Kirtland Air Force Base, home of the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center and Sandia National Laboratories. During WWII this was Kirtland Army Air Field where the 509th Composite Group trained the B-29 crews of the Manhattan Project — including Paul Tibbets' Enola Gay crew before deployment to Tinian. The original Kirtland flight line and 1940 control tower still stand inside the perimeter. Today Kirtland operates the Air Force's nuclear ordnance and emergency response missions; the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History is just outside the gate. The Sandia Mountains east climb to 10,679 ft — the Sandia Peak Tramway is the longest aerial tramway in the Americas. At 5,355ft elevation density altitude is a constant factor; summer DA can exceed 8,000ft.
Just outside Kirtland AFB / KABQ. The Smithsonian-affiliated museum tells the full story of the Manhattan Project, the Cold War nuclear arms race, and the development of America's nuclear weapons — from Trinity to Bikini to today. Outdoor Heritage Park has the actual aircraft: a B-29 Superfortress, B-52 Stratofortress, F-105 Thunderchief, and a Polaris missile. The exhibits include the actual Fat Man and Little Boy casings (real ones, but inert), the bomb hooks the 509th Composite Group used, and Robert Oppenheimer's telegrams. Difficult, important, sobering.
In Frijoles Canyon, below the Pajarito Plateau, the Ancestral Puebloans carved homes into the soft volcanic tuff between roughly 1150 and 1550 AD — natural cavates enlarged by hand, fronted by masonry rooms, reached today by climbing wooden ladders up the canyon wall just as the original residents did. The Alcove House sits 140 feet above the canyon floor, up four ladders, in a huge natural cave with a reconstructed kiva. The tuff itself came from the same supervolcano that formed the Valles Caldera next door — one of the largest volcanic craters on Earth. And on the mesa just above Bandelier sits Los Alamos, where the atomic bomb was built; the scientists hiked these ancient canyons on their days off.
Founded by Spanish colonists around 1610, Santa Fe is the oldest state capital in the United States and the highest, at 7,200 feet. On its central Plaza stands the Palace of the Governors, the oldest continuously occupied public building in the country, where Pueblo artisans still sell jewelry under the portal as they have for generations. The whole city is a deliberate work of architecture: a 1957 ordinance requires new buildings downtown to follow "Santa Fe Style" — earth-toned adobe or stucco, flat roofs, rounded edges — so the city keeps a unified pueblo-and-Spanish-colonial look found nowhere else. It became an art colony in the early 1900s (Georgia O'Keeffe made the surrounding desert world-famous), and Canyon Road is one of the densest concentrations of art galleries in the country.
On the high, empty Plains of San Agustin west of Socorro stand 27 enormous radio-telescope dishes, each 82 feet across and weighing 230 tons, arranged in a vast Y across the desert. Together they work as a single radio telescope up to 22 miles wide — the dishes ride on rails and are periodically rearranged by special transporters to change the "zoom." The site was chosen for its altitude, its dryness, and the mountain ring that shields it from radio interference. The VLA has mapped black holes, traced the gas between galaxies, and probed the edges of the observable universe. It's also a movie star: the array is where Jodie Foster's character listens for aliens in "Contact."