In Moab, what the uranium boom left behind

Late afternoon on the Colorado River, upstream of the old mill site, the water runs the color of coffee with silt. On the north bank the sandbar is littered with driftwood and the occasional tire. Across the river, redrock cliffs go straight up, banded like cake. A raven works the current, then turns and rides the air over the highway bridge. From river level, the tailings pile is just a pale rise behind a fence, the same tone as the sandstone but softer, man-made.

Moab sits in a bowl of slickrock and juniper, a town that has been a farming settlement, a mining camp, a tourist gateway, and a cleanup site, often all at once. Year-round residents read the landscape’s changes. The boom came, the boom went, and what stayed was a hill of crushed rock and chemicals a mile from the river.

Yellowcake summer

In the early 1950s, the desert around Moab filled with men carrying Geiger counters. The Atomic Energy Commission wanted uranium, and it paid well enough that a man could quit his job, park his truck at the mouth of a canyon, and walk with a scintillometer until the batteries died. The discovery that mattered came in 1952, when a prospector found high-grade ore south of town in the La Sal Mountains foothills. The strike made news, and Moab changed from a place that shipped cattle and fruit to a place that shipped ore.

Streets that had been quiet with alfalfa dust suddenly had new pickups and out-of-state plates. Boarding houses filled with drillers, geologists, and men who had left other careers to sleep in tents and chew on the idea of a strike. Bars stayed open late. In the mornings, the smell of diesel and brake smoke mixed with the juniper air. Uranium was not an abstraction in Moab; it was a paycheck, a mortgage, a reason to stay.

A mill went up just north of town, near the river, to grind the ore and extract the yellowcake that would be sent to government buyers. The mill ran for nearly three decades, and through those years the tailings accumulated behind it: finely ground rock, leftover acids and reagents, and a share of the radioactive material that had not been worth recovering. By the time the mill closed, a pile of it stood perhaps a hundred feet high and covered a hundred acres or more.

In a place where every fold of rock has a name and a story, the pile had none at first. It was simply there, pale against the red cliffs, a landmark that locals learned to navigate by. The wind moved its dust. Spring floods sometimes reached its edges. The river kept running.

The pile and the river

The town went quiet for a while after the mill shut down. Moab found other work as a base for river trips and canyon explorations, but the pile did not go away. Rain cut rills into its slopes. Volunteers grew on the barren surface, thin and pale. The Colorado River bent around the site, and the site's presence measured every conversation about Moab's future.

In time, the tailings became the largest radioactive cleanup site in the country lying next to a major river. Cleanup is measured in truckloads, railcars, and the slow work of digging down to the original ground. Under orders from the federal government, the mill tailings were to be moved away from the river to a disposal cell inland, on the high desert north of town.

The move took years. Workers scraped the pile down in lifts, wetting the material to keep dust down, loading it into railcars that whisked it north. The line ran through the edge of town and up the canyon, past the red rock and the rounded domes, past the campgrounds and the turnouts full of hikers. The railcars were covered and sealed, but their cargo was hard to ignore. A generation of children in Moab grew up knowing that the low hills beside the tracks were not always hills.

By the time the last railcar was loaded, the pile was gone from the river's edge. What remained was a flatened site and the question of what to do with a place where nothing was supposed to be built again. The answer, in the end, was a transfer station. The land along the river became a public area where people walk dogs, launch paddleboards, and watch the light change. The river is still the river, and the cliffs are still the cliffs, but the ground in between has had one story removed and another written over it.

Year-round sound

Moab's year-round people do not describe themselves as survivors of the boom or witnesses to its cleanup, though many could. They describe themselves as residents. In winter, when the tourist crowds thin and the motel parking lots empty, the town gets its breath back. The cottonwoods along the river are bare. The La Sals hold snow above the desert. The man at the feed store knows why you are buying fencing. Waitresses in the diner do not ask where you are from, because if you are here in January you are from here.

The river still floods in spring, brown and fast, and the canoe racks come out. In summer, the heat pushes everyone indoors by noon and back out by evening, when the rock glows orange and the air cools. The old uranium history does not come up much in ordinary conversation. It is in the ground, in the water table, in the names of certain roads and claims. But it is not the only story.

There is the story of the fruit orchards watered by mountain snowmelt, and the story of the river runners who mapped these canyons when they were unknown to all but a few. There is the story of the slickrock biking trails that turned a mining town into a destination, and the story of the weather moving across the desert in long curtains of rain through every season. The uranium boom is folded into all of it, the way the old railroad grade is folded into the gravel road that follows the river.

At the disposal cell north of town, the tailings are sealed under layers of filler and cap rock, flat-topped and engineered. Wind blows across it. The rock around it is the same red as everything else, and a visitor might drive past and see only a long, low bluff that appears to have been graded by a giant hand. But the railcars once headed north, one after another, and the river once ran without the pale pile beside it.

Moab does not hide its history. It just does not lead with it. The town looks west toward cliffs and blue sky, east toward snow-covered peaks, and down at the river where kids swim in summer. The uranium pile is gone from its old place, and what remains is a flat stretch of gravel, a boat ramp, and the knowledge that the ground beneath any town can hold more than water.

Photos: G. Edward Johnson (CC BY 4.0); Steven Baltakatei Sandoval (CC BY-SA 4.0)