The history of Ralston Valley
Ralston Valley, within the Nevada National Security Site, was never settled in the ordinary sense. Between 1979 and 1983 it was surveyed as a candidate basing area for the MX missile system, its alluvium and volcanic rock measured for a weapon that ultimately went elsewhere.
Ralston Valley, part of the Nevada National Security Site in Nevada, was studied between 1979 and 1983 as a candidate basing area for the MX missile system, with soil, gravity and ground-shock surveys mapping the basin's alluvium and underlying volcanic rock before the valley was left closed military land.
The valley was surveyed and tested as a missile site
Out here, on the floor of Ralston Valley, there's no building to point to. Scientists, soldiers and construction crews worked across this stretch of desert for decades, building mock towns and bunkers just to watch them vaporize.
The valley itself was part of that wider proving ground, a buffer of empty land around the blasts. Ranchers and prospectors had passed through earlier, but the desert's real modern history belongs to the atomic age. Fallout drifted over valleys like this one more than once, and downwind communities in Nevada and Utah later blamed the tests for cancers that showed up years afterward.
The valley is still closed military land, empty and silent, part of what is now called the Nevada National Security Site.
Every person, building and event in this story opens into its own dig in the app — and Strata will dig the ground under your feet instead, wherever that is, in about a minute, with every source shown.