The Abandoned Lands...A Journey Through the Colorado Plateau: The Joys and Perils of Serendipity on the Lisbon Valley Anticline

When traveling with 35 students, one must plan each day carefully. You have to be cognizant that everyone does not operate on the same bladder timing plan, that people on the trip have different metabolisms, that every stop has the potential of becoming a long delay. One tries at all times to keep to a carefully planned schedule with highly calibrated rest stops at appropriate intervals, and academic stops are structured so as to enhance the learning experience in line with the course learning objectives and previous successful academic outcomes.

And sometimes you just have to say screw it all and try something totally different.

We were well into our journey into the Abandoned Lands, an exploration of the Colorado Plateau, and we had crossed the Utah state line and were driving north on Highway 191 towards Moab and Arches National Park. We were leaving the lands of the Ancestral Pueblo people, and were coming into a region with a general paucity of obvious archaeological remains. It is a land of barren rock where water is scarce and survival difficult without the niceties of modern technology. It is the realm of the geologist.

The region between Moab and Monticello is a complex mix of anticlines, faults, and laccolithic intrusions. The combination of these structures has led to the formation of a variety of ore bodies, and the history of this landscape is tied mostly to the search for those ores, by ancient peoples as well as modern prospectors.

As we drove north we passed Church Rock, an outlier of Jurassic Entrada Sandstone. The Entrada accumulated in coastal sand dunes and muddy estuaries along a western sea. Conditions were quite arid at the time, as it was situated in the subtropics, much like the Sahara Desert today.

The plan was to make a sensible stop at a roadside rest area and continue on to our camp for the night at Arches National Park. But I was looking at the highway maps and geology road guides, and I found myself asking "why don't any of these guides say anything about Highway 113 and the uranium mines out in the Lisbon Valley Anticline?" Yes, sometimes we think that way. So, I got on radio and said we were turning onto Highway 113 to simply see what was there. It was serendipity...

I turned onto this road, which really did have kind of an abandoned look to it. As mentioned previously, I had no guides, and I had never been on the highway before, but I knew that somewhere in the ridges ahead was the fabled and deadly Mi Vida Mine, discovered by Charlie Steen in 1952.

Charlie Steen looms large in the legends of the "uranium frenzy" that gripped the Colorado-Utah borderlands in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Uranium and vanadium had been mined in the region intermittently during the early part of the century, but production was limited. It was the invention of the atomic bomb, the Cold War, along with a recession following World War II that left thousands of soldiers in the unemployment lines that led to an unprecedented migration into this barren region. It was also the first government-sponsored mining boom, as the bureaucrats promised to maintain a minimum price for uranium for at least a decade.

Charlie missed out on the draft for medical reasons, but went to work in the oil industry. By behaving just like a geologist, he got himself fired for insubordination and could not find employment anywhere in Texas. Hearing of the uranium rush, he piled his young wife and four very young sons into a surplus jeep, mortgaged his mother's home for $1,000 and headed north into the Utah Canyon Country. As a geologist, he had some ideas about where the yellow carnotite uranium ores might be found, and his ideas were viewed with amusement by his colleagues. But he sunk the last of his dollars into a drilling rig and set up on the limb of the Lisbon Valley Anticline. For months his family subsisted on poached venison stew and cereal while he drilled the 200 foot hole.

And the drill bit broke off...

He was beat. There was nothing in the hole but some kind of black coal-like material, not the bright yellow carnotite that everyone was looking for. He had samples of the black stuff in the back of the jeep when he rode into Moab for the maybe the last time.

Did I mention that Steen couldn't even afford a Geiger Counter? According to the stories I've read, he either grabbed someone with a counter to test his samples, or someone walked past his jeep with a Geiger Counter that happened to be switched on, but in any case the counter went crazy. The black stuff turned out to be pitchblende, the richest ore yet discovered on the Colorado Plateau. The layer was 70 feet thick. In a short moment, Steen went from the poor house to Boardwalk and Park Place. He named the mine the Mi Vida ("My Life").

By most accounts, Charlie Steen was generous with his new-found riches, donating to many charitable causes in the Moab area, and he apparently threw great parties. When he got frustrated with haulage costs to the government milling facilities, he built his own mill in Moab right next to the Colorado River. I suppose that it is ironic that the many millions of dollars worth of uranium that the mill produced is kind of balanced against the fact that uranium has been leaching into the Colorado River ever since, and that $300 million is being spent to haul the waste dump to a site near Cisco, one of the places that Charlie had lived in poverty.

Does anyone think that this rock is an alien monument to Jabba the Hut?

In any case, uranium transformed the Canyonlands country. Miners forced access roads into the most inaccessible terrain imaginable in search of riches. The small towns grew rapidly and sometimes painfully. But perhaps the most terrible heritage of the entire episode is that the miners were never told of the horrific dangers of mining uranium from underground mines. Radon gas was a byproduct of the radioactive decay of the uranium, and some of the unventilated mines had gas levels thousands of times the currently accepted safe level. It was hard to accept the danger from an invisible monster that took years to do its work.

Miners worked for a decade or more in the mines, but eventually many of them developed lung cancer and other diseases, and they started dying. Their families suffered too. The dangers came from wives washing coveralls covered with carnotite dust, children playing on mine dumps, and swimming in uranium-saturated waters at the mine sites. The sadness came in the arbitrary nature of the fatalities. Surprisingly healthy miners watched their children die in some instances.

We headed up the road onto the flank of the Lisbon Valley Anticline. We passed a rock that I knew must have had a name, but I had never run across it before (I found out this week that it is called Big Indian Rock).

Without maps or notes, we passed up the Mi Vida (it was tucked away in a side canyon), but saw plenty of evidence of other mining ventures. The anticline was the result of salt bodies rising and piercing the overlying rocks (the salt formed in estuaries and bays that came to be cut off from the western ocean in Pennsylvanian time). Thirty million years ago, the intrusions of the magma that formed the large laccolithic intrusions of the La Sal Mountains and Abajo Mountains provided the hydrothermal fluids that formed ore bodies along fault systems in the anticline folds. The ores included the uranium, but copper was also a major component.

We pulled over at a large open pit operation to have a look. It looked abandoned, but we stayed along the highway just the same. It turned out to be a copper mine, and bits and pieces of azurite and malachite littered the dirt along the road. Of course serendipity cuts both ways. The mine was not abandoned at all, and we were chased off by an irate security guard.

It was a fascinating look at a sad heritage. We made our way back to Highway 191 and soon arrived at Arches National Park, one of the most stunning landscapes on the planet. Our adventures will continue in a future post.

POSTSCRIPT: Check out Andrew Alden's excellent new post on uranium geology for some details on the mineralization process:  http://geology.about.com/od/mineral_resources/a/uraniumnuts.htm

Time Beyond Imagining: The End of the Story, or the Beginning?

Picking up from the ecologic trauma of my previous post, there was, in fact, a significant addition to the collection of animals living in the Colorado Plateau region in the last 10,000 years or so. It was different than any creature that existed in the region over the last 2 billion years, in that instead of living within and being adapted to the ecosystem, this creature sought to change the ecosystem to meet its own needs and desires. I am referring to humans, of course.

The first humans were hunters and nomads who made spears and atlatls to bring down large game. According to the anthropologists I know who still speak to me (they argue a lot about this stuff; it's nice to know how civil we geologists always are) they either brought about the extinction of the megafauna, or had nothing to do with the extinction. Call us the suspects or the unindicted co-conspirators in the affair, or the totally innocent bystanders. But the fact is, our cousins and forebears got to see these animals and lived among them. Some of the oldest artifacts ever found in Grand Canyon National Park are split-twig figurines of large mammals, dating to three or four thousand years ago. Even more intriguing are two petroglyphs from Utah that seem to represent a mammoth or a mastodon. They are controversial, with some saying that the rock art does not show the necessary antiquity to be the real work of an eyewitness to these extinct elephant relatives, but in any case, humans were witnesses to one of the great extinctions in the geologic history of the world, and the Colorado Plateau. And they may have caused it.

I paint with very broad strokes here, but we humans have a history of coming into a new region, using the resources, and living beyond our means until the resources are gone. Then, some kind of tragedy depopulates a region (famine, disease, invasion), so we move on and start again somewhere else.

The Colorado Plateau was first occupied by hunters and nomads who left little sign of their passing, aside from stone tools and simple shelters. Around 2,000 years ago, people began planting the food they consumed, and started building more substantial shelters and pithouses. The climate favored agriculture, and over the centuries they added new crops, including maize. The population of the plateau country expanded to levels similar to the population living there today, but by 1200 AD, something was going very wrong. A decades-long drought disrupted food supplies, and soil erosion was rampant. The architecture of their dwellings changed to a more defensive orientation, including entire villages built in high alcoves in the sandstone. By 1300 AD, pretty much the entire region had been depopulated.

Over the next few centuries, other bands of people arrived, the Navajo, the Utes, the Apache, and they lived and thrived until the region was invaded by waves of Europeans and then Americans. It seemed that everyone who arrived now was looking for something of value, be it gold, or beaver pelts, or grasslands for grazing, or coal for mining. Sometimes they found nothing and left again. If they did find something of value, they mined or grazed or hunted until the resource was exhausted, and the region would be once again abandoned.

And that is why I feel lucky to be living in an extraordinary time. Some time in the last century, there was a small group of individuals who saw a value in the land of the Colorado Plateau that was not related to money. They fought for the preservation of the best parts of the plateau country as national parks and monuments, set aside for the people of the country as a place of recreation and introspection. It was a new idea, and it was not without problems. The earliest parks were seen by their creators as tourist gold mines, and to draw tourists all manner of hotels, railroads, roads and other "improvements" were constructed. Predators were mercilessly killed off to build up deer herds. Powerful enemies were lined up to fight the establishment of every one of our national treasures, and they fought on even after parks were formed, using war and depression as an excuse to exploit valuable park resources. But through it all, the parks were preserved for the most part in a condition resembling their primeval state. They were preserved for the purpose of learning and for research.

The Ken Burns documentary "The National Parks: America's Best Idea" wraps up tonight on PBS stations. It is a stunning piece of work that explores the human journey that resulted in our national park system, an American idea that is now emulated around the world. It has been a revelation to see the story laid out in chronological order, with all the mistakes and misjudgements by people we see as park pioneers and heroes. And still, we have a park system that the American people, and indeed the world can be proud of. It is, as special unique landscapes open to all people, the best embodiment of the American ideal that all people are created equal. If you missed the first five episodes, they can be watched in their entirety on the website linked above.

And with this post I have reached the end of my chronicle on the geology of the Colorado Plateau! A project I thought would last for a month or so and include maybe a dozen posts grew into something much larger. I have no idea how many of you have followed along from the start, but I will put the posts together into a chronological unit very soon if you want to or dare to catch up. I hope you have enjoyed this journey as much as I have had writing it. I also want to thank the many people who commented and offered new information as we journeyed along.

Oh,gee... now I have to think of something new to write about!