Wind, Sand, and Scars

Climbing the Mystery Towers of Labyrinth Canyon

WHEN THE MUSHROOM CLOUD dissipated over Japan that fateful day in 1945, Moab was still a sleepy cattle town, doing a small side business in uranium. Soon, however, the fallout from the atomic bomb would forever change the desert canyons in the town’s backyard.

A post-war arms race broke out between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, sped along by a new government agency called the Atomic Energy Commission. The uranium boom was on. Moab’s population swelled to 4,600.

The AEC paid out some $25 million from the late 1950s to the early 1960s. Instead of awarding the job to a single big contractor, the commission encouraged prospectors of all skill levels to get a piece of the pie, handing out guidebooks, Geiger counters, road-building supplies, and a $10,000 bonus for new lodes of high-grade ore. Everyone and his brother were running all over the desert backcountry, plowing, blasting, and carving roads. Over 300,000 claims were filed, and a cobweb of primitive roads expanded over mesas and down every wash. It was a frenzy in the name of mass destruction, and within 12 years the AEC stockpiled enough uranium to arm 40,000 nuclear warheads.

By 1964, the boom was over, but the countless Jeep trails that had been established, traversing dizzying heights and descending terrifying grades, would greatly simplify the lives of future climbers. The Morrison, Chinle, and Moenkopi formations explored by all those prospectors happened to sandwich the Wingate sandstone that defines Canyonlands climbing. This ribbon of hardened vertical stone winds its way for a thousand miles throughout the generally crumbling strata of southeastern Utah, providing the theater for countless desert climbing epics.