Long before biotech and wireless became the dominant industries in San Diego, defense spending was what drove the region’s technology industries.  A story in this week’s San Diego Reader details the kinds of flotsam and jetsam left behind when those companies left town, in an inland area near Scripps Ranch and Poway once home to Camp Elliott.  One example is the massive Atlas rocket test pads left behind by manufacturer Convair:

“…the pads weren’t flat circles at all but enormous concrete towers, at least 50 feet high, embedded into the canyon slopes, with curved walls extending from the front. During static testing, the Atlas missiles, sans warheads, would be secured within these grey straitjackets and the liquid fuel engines ignited; Atlas remained earthbound, but its flaming exhaust would blast through the front opening, the Venturi effect channeling the angry energy into the brush below. But that was many decades ago; by the time B.R. visited, the chaparral had long since reasserted its dominance. The edifices stood — but stood in mute repose, strangled by a thicket of riotous, unauthorized growth.

Granted, the “pads” were starkly picturesque. But, more challenging, and thus more rewarding — at least from the standpoint of the urban explorer — was the complex where Atlas’s masters held sway, the maze of underground bunkers and tunnels, five levels compressed like rebar layer-cake, sub-basement beneath sub-basement. There, B.R. and the others, who went by handles like “Bozo” and “Strontium,” descended by half-rotten rope ladders and vertical ventilation shafts into a vermin-infested time capsule, circa 1960. The place stank of mold, rat feces, and — so legend had it — the desperate sweat of a Vietnam-era Marine who’d flipped his lid and for years had carried out solitary recon missions for unknown armies. But the stench was worth it: Who else, at that moment, could say he’d wiped off 40-year-old dust from the faces of a dozen wall clocks, all stopped now, but each, in its youth, having displayed the time in every time zone that mattered in the nuclear world?

The story, like all Reader tales, is long and tedious — they so pay by the word, I’m thinking.  But the area that it maps sounds like a fascinating journey through time, a great opportunity for those researching stories dating back to the postwar and Cold War eras.