The device, more than twice as powerful as the weapon at Hiroshima and with muscle equivalent to 40,000 tons of TNT, was an unorthodox tool in a grand experiment to free natural gas and kick-start a boom. The nuclear age wanted to give the oil and gas age a hand up.
“It felt like a very slow-moving tremble,” Parachute resident Judy Beasley said. “It was like a flowing of energy (underground).”
Miles closer to the blast zone, it “was like a train rushing up the canyon,” Lee Hayward told Look Magazine in 1970. Hayward’s family owned the land where the experiment took place.
“Cliffs started pouring rocks. It was quite a show, really,” Hayward said.
Read the rest of this story at Colorado Public Radio.