Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument - Deming AAF Precision Bombing Target 22

Wooden debris at the center of the target.

Bombs that were probably filled with sand.

Heavier gauge part, perhaps the detonator housing.

Google Earth image of the bombing target

I've known about these bombing targets for awhile, probably even before I became such a devotee of Google Earth, where of course they are not only easily visible, but it seems that people  make a hobby out of locating them and marking them with a little " i."  But, for some reason I have never thought about actually visiting any of them. Last year, after finding a crashed rocket out near the Sleeping Lady Hills, I was doing a little research try to find out what exactly I had found ( still don't know, but it's definitely not from the Bomber Target era during WW II) and realized there was a target a couple of miles away, what I didn't realize at the time was it's right off of County Road C006.

 Another target near Souse Springs on the north side of the Uvas Range came up in a conversation with a friend, and the next morning I just decided it was time to finally go out and  see one of these things.  I went looking for Target 22 again and when I saw how close to a maintained road it was, I took a single mileage off of Google Earth from the intersection of County Road C008 and C006 and off we went right after lunch on Sunday. Since I know almost all of these roads out there really well already, getting there was breeze. There was even a small cairn to mark the spot as we pulled off the road to park.

 We walked little bit in the to the northeast initially, out into one of the many depressions in the basin with the paled grass of last summers growth. We  didn't find much but knew we were close though because of the metal and wood debris laying about. We switched direction and soon came across a row of stones. I checked my On-X app and concluded we were at one of the outer concentric circles. 

We turned to the east and soon arrived at the center of the bullseye  where there was abundant wood debris, perhaps from a mock house that had built. There were many of the rusty dummy bombs lying around in the sand as well, most showing a ribbed appearance like the bellows of an accordion, due to the intense compression from being dropped from great heights.

 We then followed one of the crosshairs of the target, a long row of rocks about 10 feet wide, all the way out its eastern outer edge, before turning back towards our vehicle. It's really hard to get the feel of what the target looks like on the ground, because of its large size ( over 1/2 mile in diameter) and  with much of it concealed by vegetation.

 I won't go much into the history here as there are several out there, but the bare facts are these targets were constructed between 1942 and 1944 for training bombardiers. The planes took off and landed from an air base near Deming, New Mexico. Most information that I have researched says there are twenty-four in all, several, like this one, on BLM lands of Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument.