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Show The Zephyr's TOP TEN "SECRET PLACES' OF THE CANYON COUNTRY!!! #10: THE EDWARD ABBEY MEMORIAL GRAVEL/DUMP AT ARCHES NATIONAL PARK Just a couple hundred feet from Arches National Park’s picnic area and within sight of Balanced Rock, sprawled over several acres of what was once pristine national parkland lies--or oozes—the National Park Service’s Most Scenic Gravel and Waste Pit. The origins of the Arches Pit are sketchy, but this grizzled ex-seasonal ranger can attest to its existence as far back as 1975. The junk yard continues to expand, year by year, inch by inch, as it descends further into a sandy drainage that eventually makes its way to Courthouse Wash, a few miles downstream. ; On the day we did the big photo shoot for this issue, we not only found the usual mounds of gravel and asphalt, tons of discarded cut stone from the Windows Stone Stairway Project, but also five gallon cans of thick viscous fluids, open cans of oil, a hundred feet of cyclone fence, and a dozen steel fence posts that had been placed in five gallon plastic buckets and filled with concrete. © #9: LAKE POWELL'S UNDERWATER TAILINGS PILE ' 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, 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, #7: SITE OF THE LAST INDIAN WAR from Thorium-230, Radiuma and eee iiifag left ehind in’ the s rocess. The tailings J i 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 eventually shot and died from] Navajo Mountain. One of the | was over. This location, just a stone’ countered that whites were destroying native habitat. In 1923, two teenaged Utes convicted second encounter between Pose of stealing a sheep escaped from the Bluff jail and raced to Blanding. Posey and his combatants narrowly escaped « followers met them there and the two groups fled into the canyons together. The county _ left) marked the site. Today a ir commissioners wrote the governor for a plane load of machine guns and the sheriff story of Posey’s Last War. (For authorized his volunteer deputies "to shoot anything that looks like an Indian." Posey was 1996, by Barry Scholl) also contained high concentrations of heavy metals including arsenic, barium, cadmium, lead, selenium, and vanadium. Health risks? Hey...Drink up! #8 THE BICYCLE CEMETERY We have NO IDEA what this is all about. Desert Mystic and Wanderer and Born Again Baptist Carl Rappe led The Zephyr to this extraordinary Secret Place. He found it one day as he wandered aimlessly near the Arches boundary in search of cowboy camps. Instead he found this memorial tomountain bikers Pe present and future. What does it mean? #6: THE KEYSTONE PIT In the late 1980s, our county commissioners leased charged drilling companies to dump their salt wat unknown culprits started dumping a lot of other stt _ was one big, smelly toxic mess. Commissioner Knut time. Eventually Grand County got out of the busin and pushed some dirt on top of it, so now it’s im Bummer. (The photo is from 1991.) - |