Word: canyon
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Arizona Strip has long been an eagerly contested prize. Six million acres of largely federally owned desert, forest, canyons and mountains, it stretches 60 miles from the Grand Canyon in northwest Arizona up to the Utah border. Environmentalists, impressed by the region's spectacular scenery and rare wildlife, have wanted part of it declared a protected wilderness area. Developers, coveting the mineral deposits, among them perhaps the richest veins of uranium in the U.S., have been pressing for the area to be opened to mining...
...claims to some of the most majestic sections of the Grand Wash Cliffs at the strip's western edge. Energy Fuels Corp., a uranium-and coal-mining concern, agreed to the costly process of extracting ore from the top rather than the bottom of the Kanab Creek Canyon's 250 million-year-old columnlike rock formations so as to minimize environmental damage. Says Pamela Hill of Energy Fuels: "It was like trading baseball cards...
...Southwest, five lives have been claimed so far by the swift Colorado River, which is sluicing over dikes, sandbag barriers and splashboards. William Wert was on a raft excursion with 14 other vacationers shooting the Grand Canyon's Crystal Rapids when the 33-ft. rubber raft flipped; all passengers except Wert made it to shore. Farther downstream on the 1,450-mile river, in Mexico, four people drowned. "We cannot blame the Americans," said Francisco Gonzales, deputy police chief of the town of Luis B. Sanchez. "They did not make the rain and snow that are causing the river...
American officials do, however, attempt to manage the Colorado, and in the process have been forced to trigger much of the flooding. Engineers at the Glen Canyon and Parker dams have had to open their floodgates wider than ever before. Last winter's Rocky Mountain snowpack was up to three times its usual thickness, and since Memorial Day it has been melting unusually fast. Southwesterners blame Bureau of Reclamation dam managers for not releasing more of the runoff earlier. Says William Claypool of Needles, Calif.: "Anyone over the age of eight who watched TV this winter should have known...
Heavy thunderstorms last week made matters worse. Water was rushing out of the Glen Canyon spillway at about 700,000 gal. per sec., more than twice as fast as normal. With Lake Mead rising to record levels, water was about to surge over the spillways at Hoover Dam for the first time since they were tested...