The Hurricane Mesa Test Track

The main road to Zion National Park passes just beneath a piece of history that most tourists never know about: the Hurricane Mesa Test Track – HMTT. The military, in typical style, invented their own name for it: the Supersonic Military Air Research Track — SMART. Cute, huh.

If you stop by the side of the road just west of the town of Virgin, you can see the remaining structures at the top of the mesa: a water tower and a control tower stand out most.

They’re up there because Hurricane Mesa is a beautiful example of a flat topped mesa with a great bedrock on top. Unique conditions for a unique problem.

Back in the late 50’s and 60’s, this was the center of the development of the modern jet ejection seat. A test track of 12,000′ of continuously welded, heavy-duty rails, the longest rocket research track in the United States to that date, was built from one end of the mesa to the other. The entire facility included the track, launching pad, crew shelters, camera towers, rocket storage depots, water system, power system, communication system, security facilities, administration building, and a shop building. And a small air strip.

(Building airstrips on top of a mesa seems to be a Color Country “thing”. The St. George municipal airport, which I affectionately call “Kamikaze Airport”, is built on top of Black Mesa above St. George. You should try to fly in or out of St. George before they get the new one built in a few years. It’s a bigger rush than your local thrill park!)

The idea behind HMTT was to accelerate a rocket sled down the track the pilot section of a jet fighter loaded on top. At the end of the track, a dummy would be ejected into the flats below the mesa. The drop from the top of the mesa made an excellent simulation of a real ejection, especially since the rocket sled could accelerate to over 1,000 miles per hour.

Back in the 60’s, locals had great sport hunting the flats for discarded test equipment. Then for a few years, the facility was abandoned. Today, it seems to be having a second life testing automobile crashes. The flat below the mesa now has too many houses on it to eject stuff out from the edge of the mesa like they did in the good ol’ days.