Atomic Prospector

Chevrolet’s roughneck Colorado ZR2 goes hunting for radioactive history.

- Aaron Robinson

People have always seen what they want to see in those splendid red-rock canyons and spires of eastern Utah. The ancient Anasazi saw a homeland carved by the hands of divine artisans, while Captain John Macomb, exploring the area in 1859 for the U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers, reported back that “perhaps no portion of the earth’s surface is more irredeemably sterile, more hopelessly lost to human habitation.” For the writer Edward Abbey, “the red dust and the burnt cliffs and the lonely sky— all that which lies beyond the end of the roads,” was, simply, “the most beautiful place on earth.”

Charlie Steen saw money. Government greenbacks and a lot of them, buried in radioactive deposits somewhere under the layer of chocolate-colored Wingate sandstone that is the fossilized remains of Jurassic-age desert dunes. The lanky Texas geologist, who had spent his early years prospecting for oil in South America, just knew that uranium was hidden where nobody was looking, deep in the same kind of anticlinal or arch like formations that yielded oil. And in 1950, uranium was going to be the new oil, the Atomic Energy Commission paying out lavishly to those who helped mine a domestic supply.