I hope I don’t start glowing in the dark

6/26/2019 Elevation 4020

After spending a week, we pulled out of Lava Land RV park, Grants NM around 8:00 AM, of course. All but the first hike was in El Malpais National Monument. The RV park has some serious low voltage issues and later we found a different RV park that would have been a little cheaper but they didn’t have a web site……….. Will probably try them out if we stay in the Grants area again.

Why might I start glowing in the dark? Just north of Grants are large, very large Uranium mines, at one time there were something like 28 mines in operation. Some were surface mines while others were underground.  Grants is where the Uranium came from for the first atomic bombs. I’m pretty sure all the mines are closed now.

From the video we watched the truly sad part is, known or unknown about the health risk, the miners wore no protection, not even a face mask, this is even true for making the “yellow cake” which is pretty much pure Uranium.

Yesterday we toured the Mine Museum, they went so far as to recreate an underground Uranium Mine in downtown Grants, it’s not very big but shows some of the equipment used in mining, except for the geiger counters, typical mining stuff.

The uranium is actually small particles embedded in-between the sandstone, I think that what the tour said, but I can’t find anything online about it.

So we have moved a couple of hundreds miles and dropped down around 3000 thousand feet in elevation and the temperature went up, the high was around 98…… UGH, also as of 5:00 there are severe storms around us, nothing on top of us YET, but the wind did blow, probably the strongest wind we have been in since we started out travels.