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#10: The Edward Abbey Memorial Gravel/Dump at Arches National Park #9: Lake Powell's Underwater Tailings Pile #7: Site of the Last Indian War #6: The Keystone Pit (not available in web edition) #5: The Magical Mystery Bus (not available in web edition) #2:The Canyonlands National Park Pinyon/Juniper Graveyard |
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On the day we did the big phot Ed Abbey lived in a small trailer, not far from the pit in the mid-1950s. Just a few years before his death Ed returned to the gravel pit and said, "When I die, if I live that long, I'd like to be buried under that gravel, if the Park Service would be so kind." |
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Lake Powell's Underwater Tailings Pile |
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Worried about the Atlas tailings pile near Moab? Hey, no problem. Just
flood the damn thing. When Glen Canyon was flooded by the Powell Reservoir
near Hite, the water covered piles of toxic uranium tailings. Water percolating through the tailings becomes contam-inated with radioactivity from Thorium-230, Radium-226 and Radon-222 left behind in the millings process. The tailings also contained high concen-trations of heavy metals including arsenic, barium, cadmium, lead, selenium, and vanadium. Health risks? Hey...Drink up! |
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The Bicycle Cemetery |
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Site of the Last Indian War |
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Two decades into the 20th Century, tensions between white settlers and
Native Americans remained high in southeast Utah. Mormon ranchers in San
Juan County claimed that local Ute Indians, and particularly a man named
Posey and his band of "renegades, refused to respect their grazing
lands and did not "act like good Indians." The Utes countered
that whites were destroying native habitat. In 1923, two teenaged Utes convicted
of stealing a sheep escaped from the Bluff jail and raced to Blanding. Posey
and his followers met them there and the two groups fled into the canyons
together. This location, just a stone's throw from the White Mesa Mill, marks the site of the second encounter between Posey and the deputies. One horse was killed and several of the combatants narrowly escaped death. For years, only a homemade and cryptic sign (above left) marked the site. Today a interpretive BLM sign, riddled with bullet holes, tells the sad story of Posey's Last War. (For an excellent account of Posey's War, see The Zephyr, Aug/Sep 1996, by Barry Scholl) |
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Rockworm Canyon |
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THE MOST INCREDIBLE CLIFF.... Is that Bob Castaldo's latest 4WD? An oil & gas thumper truck? A support vehicle for a Sierra Club outing? Whoever it is, they've found the spectacular rim of Rockworm Canyon, one of the best-kept secrets in SE Utah. Accessible by foot or vehicle, it's particularly spectacular at sunset. |
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The Road To/From Nowhere |
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Just before the arch, however, as you travel south, the old right-of-way veers to the southwest. The road, out of use for more than 40 years is returning to Nature. The asphalt is crumbling, the rabbitbrush grows along the fades centerline, the edges of the highway are breaking off and disintegrating. But for .6 mile, the highway is inexplicably paved, complete
with fog and center lines. Then, as suddenly as it began, the pavement end
and the old highway reappears. An aerial view shows the new pavement clearly.We're
bewildered. The highway that starts nowhere, goes nowhere, and ends nowhere.
If only ALL roads were like this... |
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The Canyonlands National Park Pinyon/Juniper Graveyard |
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Before the early 1980s, when the road to Grandview Point was still a narrow
dirt track, the trip was dusty and slow. One of the reasons the trip took
so long was because it was rocky and rutted and you couldn't go very fast
without rattling all your teeth loose. Another reason why it took so long is because the road went around trees and followed the topography of the terrain instead of going through it (and them). Of course, when the NPS finally and reluctantly paved the road, it took out most of the curves and leveled the dips and humps.
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AND THE #1 SECRET PLACE OF CANYON COUNTRY: THE WHITE MESA MILL at BLANDING, UTAH! |
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Now, the mill wants 840,000 tons of contaminated dirt from Maywood, New Jersey. According to the Sierra Club, the dirt contains radioactive thorium, volatile organic compounds, pesticides, metals, and other hazardous wastes." The dirt would be hauled by rail to Cisco, Utah, and then by truck through Moab, Monticello, and Blanding at a rate of 46 to 86 loads per week, for seven years! And if that's not enough good news, IUC could not pass up
the opportunity to get its hands on Moab's own Atlas Tailings Pile. Most advocates
of re-locating the multi-million ton pile have proposed that they be moved
20 miles north to a location on Klondike Flats, near I-70. But IUC wants to
build a slurry line, almost 90 miles south to the White Mesa mill. These guys just love nuclear waste. And yet, while other nuclear waste sites get all kinds of publicity, the White Mesa Mill struggles along in relative obscurity. Until recently, the only press it was able to muster came from The Zephyr's Ken Sleight, who has been shining all the light he could upon it for years. But now the Sierra Club has entered the fray and hopes to give the mill a lot more attention in the near future. So...to our pals at IUC we award them "The Zephyr's #1 Secret Place." CONGRATULATIONS! You may be reinvigorating SE Utah's old moniker as "Uranium Capital of the World," but we'd bet the second home market in Blanding is awful...especially when the wind blows. |
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