Shafer Trail Viewpoint — A Native Route Becomes a Uranium Road
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Transcript
The Shafer Trail drops about 457 metres from the Island in the Sky mesa in a spectacular set of switchbacks. Its function changed repeatedly. Native people used routes through the cliffs to reach resources; ranchers later moved livestock between seasonal grazing areas; in the uranium boom of the 1950s, roads were widened for trucks and prospectors. The National Park Service notes that uranium exploration created hundreds of miles of roads across southeastern Utah. Today recreation keeps many of those routes alive. This is an important reversal: infrastructure built to extract minerals helped make the region accessible to tourists and strengthened the case for protecting it as a national park.