From Ghost Town to Adventure Capital: Moab After Uranium
Near Moab, Utah
When the uranium market collapsed in the nineteen seventies and eighties and the processing mill that had piled radioactive tailings on the banks of the Colorado finally closed, Moab had to figure out what came next. Population had fallen sharply from the boom peak. Businesses had closed.
The town that uranium had built was learning what it was without it. The answer was visible from every window: the canyon country itself. Mountain bikers began arriving in force in the nineteen eighties, drawn by the Slickrock Trail and the extraordinary terrain surrounding it.
River runners had been floating the Colorado and Green Rivers for years. Rock climbers discovered the sandstone towers. Jeep enthusiasts pushed into the canyons on four-wheel-drive trails.
Adventure tourism became a real industry, then the dominant one, and then the thing that defined Moab to the outside world. By the twenty-first century, Moab was drawing millions of visitors a year, creating traffic jams on the highway through the valley, filling every campsite in every park, and straining the water supply of a desert town that had never expected to become a destination of this scale. The transformation that saved Moab economically created a new problem: how much use can this canyon country absorb without becoming something less than what people are coming to find.
Moab is still working on that question. It is the kind of problem that only a very successful reinvention produces, and the town that went from uranium to mountain bikes is not done changing.
