These were the early days of electronic warfare, and there were not a lot of Red Dog spare parts lying around. As a result, Ken Swanson worked many long weekends at Area 51. Swanson says that sometimes he and his Sylvania colleague felt like they were the only ones on the base. One weekend the men took the Area 51 motor pool’s four-wheel-drive vehicle up to Bald Mountain, the tallest peak on the Groom Range, to have a look around. “We found a bunch of old Model Ts and had no idea what they were doing there,” Swanson recalls. Another time he went solo to investigate the old mines. “I was wearing tennis shoes and Bermuda shorts and I bumped into a bunch of rattlers sunning themselves. Next time I went back, I wore snake boots,” he says. During winter weekends, there were even fewer people at Area 51, and for entertainment, after a long day performing high-tech electronic-countermeasures work, Swanson would go joyriding around the dry lake bed. He’d borrow an Econoline van from the motor pool, take it out on the frozen tarmac, and do spins. “But I stopped after I had the van on two wheels once,” Swanson says.
With Red Dog, the CIA wanted to see how the Oxcart would show up on Soviet radar, and so, at the southern tip of Groom Lake, on EG&G Road, Sylvania built two ECM systems, one to simulate Russian SA-2 radar and a second to simulate the Fan Song surface-to-air missile system that was showing up in North Vietnam. The goal was to see what Oxcart looked like, or hopefully did not look like, on these radars. An equally important part of the radar testing system was the radar pole that had to be installed on the top of Bald Mountain. For that, the CIA recruited one of the best rescue helicopter pilots in the country, Charlie Trapp.
“I was minding my own business in South Carolina,” Trapp recalls, “when these guys from the Air Force called me up and asked if I want to come fly a two-airplane helo unit in Nevada, one hundred miles from the nearest town. They said it was important and that I’d have to be able to hover and land at nine thousand feet.” Trapp thought it sounded interesting as well as challenging and he signed on. “We flew in from Nellis in the H-43 [helicopter] and before we even landed at Area 51, they said, ‘Let’s go see how you land on top of the mountain first,’ that’s how important the mountain project was to the beginning of my Area 51 assignment.” For months, Trapp hauled cement in thousand-pound buckets from the Area 51 operations center up to the top of Bald Mountain. “I’d hover over the top and lower the equipment down,” Trapp explains. “There were high winds and serious dust storms.” Finally, Trapp helicoptered in the one-hundred-foot-long radar pole, which a team of workers cemented into place. Mission accomplished. “We did such a good job, the CIA gave us air medals,” Trapp says. On his way back down to Area 51 in the helicopter, Trapp would fly around the different mountain peaks. “Once, I came across an old graveyard. In a helicopter you can hover and look. The graves were made of piles of rocks. I remember two of them were really small. They must have been kids’ graves.” The mountain had a psychological pull with many of the men at Area 51 during the Oxcart years. It was also the only place the men were allowed to go that was technically “off base.”
Down on the tarmac, every time an A-12 Oxcart took off, it was Trapp’s job to hang out airborne, two hundred feet above the runway and off to one side, “in case the aircraft crashed,” Trapp explains. “My helicopter contained firefighting equipment, and I always had two PJs with me, para-rescue jumpers, [who perform] like a Navy SEAL. It was a lot of work having us airborne and I told the boss, Colonel Holbury, that I could be airborne in less than two minutes’ time. So the policy changed.” Instead, Trapp was on standby in the event of an accident, “which meant I got to drive the only golf cart around the Area 51 base.” The golf cart came in handy at night. “We played a lot of poker in the House-Six bar,” Trapp explains. “The loser had to do the late-night cheeseburger run over to the mess hall. With the golf cart, you could get there and back in five minutes.”
For all the technology that was around at Area 51, entertainment was decidedly old-school. “We did a lot of arm wrestling,” Trapp says. “Some guys played racquetball and other guys played three-hole golf.” When Trapp gained ten pounds eating so many late-night cheeseburgers, he was ordered to lose the weight or risk losing his job. To assist in the effort, Colonel Holbury challenged Trapp to weekly rounds of squash. Once, someone brought a sailboard out to Area 51, and the pilots pulled rank and got the men in the machine shop to affix wheels to the bottom of the board. “We took the thing out to Groom Lake when the wind was blowing really hard,” Trapp recalls. “It didn’t go that fast but we didn’t care.”