Tuesday, April 26, 2011 - Devil's Canyon Campground, Blanding UT
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Sandstone Plus, White Canyon, Fry Canyon UT, April 22, 2011
What is that I see?
Down there. In the crick bed. Amongst the wonderfully multicolored tumbled sandstone river rocks. Those harder, slicker, gray rocks. What are they? Here's my guess. Uranium. Well, uranium bearing rocks.
Toward the top of the colorful sandstone layers forming the buttes around here is a very distinct gray layer. You can even see it as bluish rings around the buttes on my Google Night Camps map - it's quite extensive. It seems to me these river rocks down here tumbled out of the eroding buttes above and that the gray ones came from the gray layer.
Sandstone Plus, White Canyon, Fry Canyon UT, April 22, 2011
Somewhere I read whilst at Capitol Reef a few days back that the gray layer visible there contains uranium. There are mines here - one I saw from the roadside was involved with the gray layer. There are uranium mines in this area. Ergo...
Night camp
Site 7 - Devil's Canyon Campground, Blanding UT
- Verizon cell phone and EVDO service - good signal
- Go to Devil's Canyon Campground website
- Locate Devil's Canyon Campground on my Night Camps map
- Check the weather here
The Heliograph in the Apache Wars
"The mountains and the sun...were made his allies, the eyes of his command, and the carriers of swift messages. By a system of heliograph signals, communications were sent with almost incredible swiftness; in one instance a message traveled seven hundred miles in four hours. The messages, flashed by mirrors from peak to peak of the mountains, disheartened the Indians as they crept stealthily or rode swiftly through the valleys, assuring them that all their arts and craft had not availed to conceal their trails, that troops were pursuing them and others awaiting them. The telescopes of the Signal Corps, who garrisoned the rudely built but impregnable works on the mountains, permitted no movement by day, no cloud of dust even in the valleys below to escape attention. Little wonder that the Indians thought that the powers of the unseen world were confederated against them."