Day 10 - Moab

When we got into Moab yesterday, we went to the local market to stock up on supplies. I was pleased to see that there was a local beer available in the store, so the Utah liquor laws aren't that strict after all.  Of course, once we got it to the campsite, we realized that it was 3.2% beer, so while it tasted OK, it wasn't as great as it could have been.

Here are some pictures of the surrounding areas of our campsite.

Since today was a lazy day, we went into town to see what could be seen. We found a cool rock shop (called Desert Sunset, run by a really nice guy named Sterling Wade) and we got Mrs. B an agatized dinosaur bone from the Morrison Formation, which is Late Jurassic Age, 135 to 136 million years old.  We then went to the local Moab Museum and learned a lot about the surrounding area.  Turns out that there is quite a history to the area. It was primarily a frontier area, and several well-known bad guys (Butch and Sundance, Billy the Kid) would hide out in the twisty passages of The Canyonlands. After WWII, uranium was found in the area, and many people tried to prospect for it (not really a bright idea). Turns out one major strike was discovered, and a processing plant was put on the Colorado river. It was this industrialization that enabled roads to be built, opening up the area to tourism. However, after 1985 the uranium mining ceased, as it was much more cost effective to mine it from other areas.

As an aside, some of the uranium used in the Manhattan project was actually purchased from a mine in the Congo, and Africa continues to be a producer of uranium.

There were also some interesting exhibits of older stuff, like this almost complete Ankylosaur skeleton

There was also a somewhat bizarre collection of "Atomic Priesthood" regalia. It turns out that in 1984 a semiotician named Thomas Sebeok wrote a paper for the Department of Energy to try and solve the problem of how to communicate to civilizations 10,000 years in the future. They wanted to do this to warn future peoples to stay away from radioactive waste sites and other potentially hazardous areas (see: Chernobyl, Fukushima). His paper essentially said to create a religion that would communicate the dangers through the millennia (and here we find echoes of A Canticle for Leibowitz). A local lady in Moab decided that the priests should have outfits, so she started the Atomic Priesthood Regalia.

That seems like a lot for a rather lazy day. Tomorrow will be a posting about Arches National Monument.