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Show Sea Shells High On Plateau? Yep, They're Historical Leftovers AL LOOK rny Copyright 195J by Al Look A Moab native swung his arm Ik a circle and told the greenhorn prospector he could fine uranium tut "thataway." He wasn't kidding. Any direction you travel out of this overloaded ex-cow town you find millionaires digging atoms. Before 1950 this vast, forbidding plateau was crisscrossed only by unexplored canyons cutting their Way through sandstone cliffs and oceans of sage brush knolls and tcnib timber. The seventy million four hundred thousand hard acres of rocky anatomy Is pock-marked with sunk en deserts, spiked by naked peaks end hazy mesas on the skyline lo form a country of great sterile beauty and mass grandeur. One hundred 'and ten thousand square tniles laced with twisted juniper and stunted plnon forests that have bever been surveyed, much less explored, or fenced. This Is the fabulous, terrifying Colorado Plateau where uranium fat found. A high table land blistered with lacolithie columns and steep chiseled canyons. About twice the size of the New England States, and, if Ironed out flat, it would be half the size of Texas. Srobably : was, and still is, the last wild frontier in this country. Usually dry, water is absent except after Infrequent rains. Then for a few bours dry washes become gulleys tt impassable, swift flowing red paste with the grip of a steel trep. Prospectors Arrive A few thousand greenhorn prospectors, recently arrived, aren't eoing to civilize these purplish peaks, red cliffs and blue mesas In the coming decade. They can buff and puff and ventilate the scenery with prospect holes, but the plateau will be there long after the A and H-bombs are history. The AEC has built $6,000,000 worth of access roads, some with steep, tortuous grades over the long tongues of perpendicular cliffs that snake a ghost turn pale. Corkscrew-big a Jeep through these vast patches of aspen and broad splot- 2.M. M .-.i- '1 . , DOUBLE BRAINED IDIOT At left Is Stegosaurus, the goofy dinosaur with two brains and horns on his tail. Behind him in the shallow sea is Brontosaurus, the 40-ton monster who used gizzard stones to grind his food. Attacking is Allosaurus, the fierce meat eater of his time, whose forelegs had degenerated into mr "arms" with long, vicious claws. Thse animals lived on the Colorado Plateau around 100,000,000 B. C ches of vivid color, it Is still possible to meet no one for a week. There is still room for the unwary prospector to get lost among its serrated and crumbling cliffs that have no street markers. This balcony to the high mountains on the continental divide has swallowed thousands of prospectors, miners, truckers and mill hands In one gulp, and is willing to take on 'all who choose to come. Press accounts say the country is booming, and so it is. The boom is there, but it is difficult to locate in this country where everything is high, wide and mighty. Ia an average altitude of 4,000 feet the newcomers breathe heavy and tire easily as they put one foot ahead of the other trudging up one slope and down another. The unhindered sun can blister a leader skin before the owner is aware of exposure, and the winter snow burns are as painful as the summer sunburn. The chevrons of ragged slide rock bruise tender feet without warning, and hardy oak brush rips clothing and cuts pink flesh when least expected. The metamorphic rocks grind off shoe soles, and the sandstone works ea the seat of the prospector's pants. Looking over the edge of a cliff where distant mountains are under foot, the mind can get dull and the stomach weak. Ambitious prospectors push their Jeeps far back into the Four Corners country, the only place in the U. S. where you can place a dime in four states and get back six cents change. All around where Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Arizona meet to divide the compass, the gamma rays and beta particles are still dancing. Nothing can stop them, and who wants to stop them? They are worth about a dollar each If you can find them. These active atoms have been slithering out of the rock for billions of years and while they cannot be destroyed, they can be counted. Invisible, colorless, silent, they cannot be touched, tasted or smelted, but they can be collected. Awesome Mounfains All who enter the Colorado Plateau area must marvel at the splintered cliffs, its ragged mountains and sharp edged bluffs, mesas, and buttes, the stately monoliths and majestic canyons etched from layers of hard rock. A new prospector slings a Gel-ger counter over his shoulder, pokes some sandwtches into bis pack sack, climbs to the base of the rtmrock, and there finds a bed oi sea shells. They are exactly like the shells he has seen on a west coast beach. They are shaped and colored the same, many have the same iridescence, but they are solid rock. And if he is curious, and he must be or he wouldn't be there, he wonders how sea shells can be found over one thousand miles from shore and over one mile higher than tidewater. This Is the newcomers first brush with Colorado Plateau geology. Later he will rub off some palentology and be exposed to archeology to increase his interest in natural history. One of the last primitive areas in the United Stales, the Plateau was also one of the first explored by white man, and visited by Father Escalante In 1776. Before 1950 it was inaccessible except to the few hardy intrepid wanderers who wanted to get away from it all. They could, and still can get over 180 miles from a railroad. The early geographers called this area the Great American Desert and any prospector who has carried water for a week as he hunts the illusive radioactive uranium will agree. Next, the embryo geologist will notice that rocks are In layers. In most places these layers are level one upon another, but others, he notices, are tilted, bent, twisted and in some cases go in all angles. Perhaps at no other place has the geological history of the earth been revealed on so vast a scale. Here ran be read the history of the world preserved in the canyons and cliffs, with surfaces kept bare by the arid climate. Every mesa, butte, escarpment is capped by a hard stratum which forms its edge. The gentler slopes are but softer, weaker strata with no hard rock to protect them from erosion. Melied Rock Layers On closer examination this sod buster from the plains notices that most of the rocks are made up of hardened layers of sediment while others seem to have been melted at one time, He now has learned to distinguish between sedimentary and Igneous rocks, both hard, both Interesting. The sedimentary rocks are solidified " debris washed down by extinct rivers from bigger slopes which accumulated on the bottom of oceans, lakes, swamps and estuaries. This sediment was (Continued next pace) |