The Yellow Rocks

When Pratt Segmiller isn't running a filling station in Marysvale (pop. 600), Utah, he hunts rocks. One day, while prospecting around the sage and cedar-covered mountains northeast of Marysvale, he found some strange yellow-colored rocks strewn over a surface of about 60 acres. Segmiller thought they might be valuable, so he staked a claim and called the Vanadium Corp. of America. When it inspected the claim; it got pretty excited and leased the land from Segmiller. The yellow rocks were autunite, a uranium-bearing ore, and the strike looked like the most promising yet made in the U.S.

Not until after six months of digging and other exploratory work will Vanadium Corp. surely know whether the claim is rich enough to mine commercially. And Pratt Segmiller's strike probably is not rich enough to qualify for the $10,000 bonus which the Atomic Energy Commission has offered for the first 20 tons of 20% uranium ore. (Despite thousands of claims, none has yet qualified.)

But his discovery was good news to the 800 uranium prospectors now wandering over the vast Colorado Plateau. Some are gnarled, weather-beaten desert rats packing their gear on a mule, looking for telltale yellow uranium streaks on the faces of weathered cliffs. Others are pink-cheeked amateurs with Geiger counters who clamber over the rocks, listening with ear phones for radioactive clicks, thus providing a source of innocent merriment (see cut). At Marysvale, claims have been staked on every inch of land for eight miles around Segmiller's strike, and the town citizens are now spending almost all their time in the hills.

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