One day in 1995 my mother and I were driving around Southeastern Arizona looking for birds and not having much luck finding them.  We did, however, find a Titan missile silo and a very large pile of mine tailings, near the decidedly uneponymously named Green Valley, a city consisting almost entirely of senior citizens in golf carts.  The 1995 Birding Arizona Johnson Family Vacation Journal takes up the narrative, having acknowledged that as birders we were less than inadequate: "So we headed back for Green Valley. The roadside geology book said that one could get a good look into a strip mine by going to the end of Duval Mine Road, at the north end of town, so we took a detour. Before we got to the mine, we saw a sign for the Titan Missile Museum and Park, and I pulled in there. It was a missile base, all right. Joan was doubtful about going in, but I darted into the gift-shop and asked what exhibits they had. The place was run by senior-citizen volunteers.  I guess these were the ones who weren't into golf.  There was a tour starting right away, I was told, that looked at the missile from above and then went down into the underground missile shaft and control center. I ran back to the car and dragged Joan in to pay for both of us. She got a “senior citizen” discount!"

"We joined up with a party of five or six men in the “briefing room” where one of the senior citizens sketched the history of the site. We all got hard-hats to put on, and saw a short, uplifting, contentless video. This missile site was on alert from 1963 to 1984. Russian satellites still keep an eye on it, to make sure nothing funny is going on. When it was operating, there were no buildings or anything above ground except a fence. When it became a park, they brought in various trucks and cars and a helicopter to dress up the site for tourists. Our above-ground guide told us that when they took the helicopter away to repaint it, the Russians called up and asked where it went. He told us we could wave if we wanted."

I'm the one in the yellow shorts.  The guys with big waists are all Caterpillar Men.

"Above ground there were many interesting if inscrutable things. There was a ‘tipsy’ Doppler-based security system consisting of a series of posts with attachments I couldn’t describe. There were fuel stands and emergency hose-down stations for if any fuel leaked. We got a very technical description of the fuels, but the only things I understood from that was that was 1) you really, I mean really, didn’t want to make any mistakes in handling them or even be in the area if anything mechanical went wrong with the valves, and 2) I was probably right not to go into any kind of military job that involved stuff like this. They also had on display a warhead capsule (sans warhead, I gathered) designed to blow up half a continent. The guide’s description of the effect that the payload was designed to achieve was so graphic I was surprised we all didn’t have to show signed notes from our parents before starting the tour. We got to look down into the missile silo through some windows on top of it. The missile they had in there was a training one. A real one would have dangerous residues of the volatile fuels."

"A very short fat Australian man often asked questions of the guide. They were very technical questions, and delivered in a strong Aussie accent, so that the rest of us had no idea what he was talking about. The guide didn’t, either. We did learn that the megatonnage in that warhead was still a classified matter. Joan and I were the only two females in the party, which was kind of funny. The men were apparently from a Caterpillar convention. At least, they were all wearing name tags like people at a convention do; I didn’t get a good look at what the name tags said, though. When we first started out on the tour, our guide looked over the group and said, “I guess this week must be the caterpillar convention!” I hadn’t noticed any name tags at that point, so I started frantically scanning the ground for caterpillars. I thought maybe he had been remarking on the number of caterpillars on the ground, but I didn’t see any."