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Show Claim Filing Junkei Records finding ot Brenda's Bronco Ed g0te Current claim filing fibres climbing dajv and so much interest ha$ been generated on the uranium scene that the Times v Independent sent ne of its correspondents int( M field for a first hand took at the tradlt-fenal tradlt-fenal claim filing ritual. If you haven't tried Jo find your fortune ..in.. "them jthar hills" or if you already have we urge . vou to persue the experience experi-ence of "Brenda the Claim Filer. by Brenda Owning a mining claim jias become almost a status stat-us symbol in Moab since the 3 world's first urainum boom centered here some 10 years ago. I!d pined for a claim of , imy own ever since Carles Steen .struck it rich jn',"MiVida" 30 miles from my back door. But at heart I'm no pioneer, pione-er, and it took a lot to lure me to the hills like an order from the editor for a prospecting story. I was prdbably ' the best equipped tenderfoot in the business . the. day I finally staked my claim. The TI lined 'me uip'with a profes sional 'mine surveyor, and and I signed on as helper. Believe me, my company status won me no favors. By the time we returned to the comforts .of home, I j knew what the life of a j Southeastern Utah uran-iunj uran-iunj hunter was like. Sunrise Breakfast . The cafe was filled! with ojher. prospectors when we stopped for a sunrise break-ifejst. break-ifejst. Bits of mining talk floated, over ham and eggs, and thermos jugs sat on tables waiting to be filled. I quivered with excitement, and settled . into my role. Vhen someone ventured the question "where are you staking", I had an evasive answer ready. "Man, I won't even know where I've been when we get back," and a truer statement was never made. My guide drove a Bronco, , and we'd better clarify that j term. A Bronco is a sawed-i sawed-i off 4-wheel drive pickup in high rise, and a better named vehicle is not on the road. But I learned one thing as the day wore on, they can go places I'm never nev-er going to ride. ! ; Not Fussy I got a condensed educa-I educa-I tion in geology as we rode along. Uranium, my apt instructor in-structor explained, is found in two formations in Southeastern South-eastern Utah; Morrison, where yellow paydirt is found, and Shinarump, which yields a slate black ore like Steen's MiVida. Personally I wasn't fussy. mountain of uranium could be purple for all I cared as long as it made a j geiger tick. i A Geiger Counter was a i familiar oxd y e" w , j. "da ,5 dusted one on the basement j shelves for the past ten fi years. It was invented by I a Moab man during World i War n to take the guess- v'-k out of geology. Dur- ing Moab's uranium boom j)here were more carried 3 down the streets than teen- age transistors today. They 'ook similar, except a Gei- ger has a face like a bar-jj bar-jj ometer and sounds off like 5 a rattle snake around radio 8 active material. I Names Interesting I figured naming my j f!aim was more pressing at J "e moment than knowing hat formation it was in. Mlne names are a fascinat- ;ng lot. Steen called' his Ml Vida", a Spanish term meaning "my life wh,ich he gambled, to find the mine, i he "Big Buck" drew its "ame from a huge antlered er which almost overran te prospector who located the Yellow Circle was named from a round yellow propping in the face of cliff, which the owner d off for a gardlen ornament. orna-ment. There's "The Last Po: fn eans"' named by a gone- wroke prospector, and Matchless", found when its 2frs had run out of tches. Some like the Em- "a and the "Alice" were i earned after favorite wo. men, and the "Tinkeribells". after a child's good luck faiiry. The gem though is the "Now Hear This Then" claim. But I had no more time just then to name my mine; from that point on I was too busy pulling leather. We had run out of pavement, pave-ment, and the rest of the way I sat on more daylight than seat. Each time my head hit the cab tap we dropped into another chug hole and returned to the gravity sphere. We sage-hopped sage-hopped across an abandoned field where before the century cen-tury long drowth early-day pioneers had eeked out a living. Rough as it was I'd never have believed before the day was over I'd be glad to see that field again. Steep Turns Next came the canyons! We crawled up grades so steep all that was visible ahead was blue horizon. Everytime we conquered a hill, there was a downhill just like it ahead There were turns so steep we had to back up . to stay on course and dropoffs along the side that seemed to be bottomless. bottom-less. The point of no return was always, but just before I was ready to cry uncle, we got where we were going. go-ing. I didn't know whether to kiss the ground, or feed the Bronco some grass. We were standing in scrub covered yellow-gray soil which my guide explained explain-ed was Morrison. Across the canyon tall red entrada cliffs loomed at a dJzzying angle. This freakish ar rangement of the earth's layers, I learned, was called the Moab Fault, a geological wonder of the world'. Some of the world's richest uranium uran-ium deposits lie near Moab, and the supply has scarcely been tapped. But Mother Nature seldom gives any-! any-! thing away for free, and uranium is no exception. Some billion years ago she pulled the pillars from under un-der Southeastern Utah and turned the. landscape topsy turvy. She surveyed the resulting re-sulting canyons, gorges, and chevasses and said, "there it is, finder's keepers." . Spirits Drop We turned on the Geiger Counter for a general reading. read-ing. It was wavering madly and I could scarcely contain (ny excitement. Wp must be in a uranium world! Not so; there's a limited amount of radiation in the air, I learned and the Geiger must be set accordingly. It dropped to zero; ditto my spirits. , We hiked along the cliffs, eyes and ears on the counter, count-er, stopping now and then to check the rocks along the way. In places the terrain ter-rain was multi-colored, and resembled a club sandwich. One foot thick charcoal layer, lay-er, I learned, was carbona-tious carbona-tious material. If we waited it would develop into uranium. uran-ium. But we were in a hurry hur-ry and plodded on. Suddenly we got an erratic action on the Geiger; we held it on the rocks and it ticked a little lit-tle faster. Then we rounded a corner and discovered why. Someone had been here before! Three holes some 3 feet in diameter had been chisled out of the cliff banks, one about 20 feet into the ledge. An ancient an-cient ramp was erected near by where apparently ore had been toted by wheelbarrow, wheel-barrow, across the ravine. The boards were bleached pale gray, and had rotted into in the middle, leaving the ramp dangling on each side of the creek. Discover Mine The prospecting holes, I was told, could date back to the turn of the century when a few Moab miners pioneered in uranium, chisel ing out a little hygrade to s'hip to Madam Curie. We checked the exploration explora-tion holes with the Geiger; the indicator almost flipped off. Some one had a mine here, the question was when. We scoured the country coun-try side searching for markers mark-ers or corners, but the only identification was a tumbled d.wn pile of rocks which had been the "discovery monument". We decided to restake it. Staking a mine is marking mark-ing out a 600 x 1500 foot rectangle with cornerstones, then filing a claim notice to tell the world it's yours. We narked our corners with 4 x 4's, with the exception of one on a solid rock ledge, which we marked! with a pile of rocks. Either way is legal. Set Lines Some prospectors pace the footage of a claim and guess it out; not us. We unloaded un-loaded enough technical e-quipment e-quipment to build a bridge. I thought my guide was kidding when he handed me a 13-foot stadlia rod with orders to proceed up the mountainside 300 feet. I found muscles I didn't know I had and got the job done, while he built a discovery monument with 4 x 4's and some rocks, and set up his transit. I received instructions instruc-tions through a walkie talkie talk-ie hung around my neck, and somehow hoisted th3 towering rod upright in the gusty wind and managed to plumb . it with a little hand level. I piled flat rock into a mound until my helper below be-low signaled it was high enough, then lugged the rod down the mountainside and repeated the procedure 300 feet the other way. Our first 600 foot line was set. I manned the rod on the location while my guide took off in the Bronco with the transit to set the 1500 ft. corners. The vehicle crept up a dim trail, which wound across the mountain in 50 foot layers, until it looked like a beetle climbing to the slope and its drone could' no longer be heard. The world around me was so quiet the ripple of a paper which had blown from the truck startled startl-ed me; once a modern day jet broke the silence as it roared overhead and left a vapor trail in the sky. The walkie talkie sputtered bits of garbled conversation to other operators somewhere in the hills; it was raining in Oklahoma, . snowing in Ohio, and in Mississippi some man's wife had sat up all night waiting to contact him in the Moab hills. Then . the little radio began barking bark-ing orders to me, and once again I battled the wind to upright the rod! and balance the bubble in the level. Precarious Trip I watched fearfully as the Bronco rounded a curve on the hill on its precarious trip down, and wondered if it didn't make it how I'd ever get out. At last the corners were established and my guide produced a Location Notice. It was time to name my mine. "Call it the Bronco," I said, as sort of a bribe to the trusty vehicle to get us safely home. Then we stuck the notice in an empty beer can and wediged it in the Iniicrp. T christened "Brenda's Bronco" with the remnants of coffee in my cup. We stopped along the way home, to tie the claim in, and each time I wrestled the tall rod back into the air. Once the walkie talkie j singed my ears when I i stood the rod upside down, but my guide appeased me M soon after with a cup of bean soup cooked over a sagebrush fire. Noise Ominous The noise of the little city seemed ' almost ominous as we drove back into the city limits, and it suddenly oc- i curred to me what a rare day we had spent. The only man-made sounds we had heard were our own, and those over the walkie talk- ( ies. It surely wouldn't take long to get un-used to civi- 1 ilization. One more technicality re- I mained; we had to file a ' copy of the Location Notice j in the County Recorder's Of- 1 fice. We paid the Recorder j $2 to do the job for us. There were 170 claims a-head a-head of ours . that day. I mentally calculated the investment in-vestment in "Brenda's Bronco". Bron-co". We had used a $1,000 transit, a $60 stadia rod, a level, and a pair of walkie talkies, another $200. A good Geiger costs about Continued on Page B2 .'-. i ' 1 1 ' ' : . r:f 0 l:? r . ' v , - t,. ' : - --.v-rL-w i v , - i . ' rrr Hr , - -fop sfe , 1 4 , f w.,.,.. f The Bronco picked its precarious way up a dim mountain trail, probably marked by early-day uranium prospectors, prospect-ors, then disappeared from sight. It's A . v . ? '-) s fA . . ,? . . ..t-. ,-.. . .. . . . ... I '' - . liri I . , - " . 7 , I v ., .... f i. - -. v - , i The Big Moment in a Prospector's Life, when the geiger begins to click and the I ' " V" " " ' - I i . ) -; f 4 .,.- 4 I - . -' 5 i i l i ' J s 1... . . y X : ' - :: !";: " I :- " ' " 1 - i : V " ) ) ' x r " , - ' ' ' . . '' ' - i ' Tools of the Trade The discovery monument, trusty Geiger Counter, and an empty beer can to hold the location notice. During the '50's uranium boom a weird feeling to be left alone in-a rugged canyon with only a two-way radio for company. ; 7. :. 'indicator says "Pay Dirt." in IMoab, hand-v.Tritten location notices dated back to the turn of the century were often found where hopeful prospectors pros-pectors placed them long ago. BRENDA'S BRONCO (Cont. from Pag, t $150, and the Ercs been worth its uranium Added to would be engineers.. ces, plus a few !..' penses such as gas. i-l knock the heck out oj j And this is the ol-if-. ed method of which is being s-. with expensive dnl;. grams? Madre Kj, der uranium boos 5' scarce! |