Jerry Holliday wasn’t pleased when he found out that
Forest Service workers blasted down the walls of his cinderblock
cabin in southern Utah’s Manti-La Sal National Forest. “Hell, you
just don’t blow somebody’s property up and walk away,” Holliday
told the Salt Lake Tribune. Holliday and co-owners Gene and Kenny
Shumway had built the cabin on public land they claimed for mining
in the 1950s, then mined uranium ore on the unpatented land for
over 20 years. When uranium prices dropped in the early 1980s,
Holliday says they used the cabin for road work related to mining.
But Forest Service geologist Jim Egnew, of the Monticello ranger
district office, says the men used the cabin for recreation, and
that the trio’s mining plan failed to show how the cabin was
“reasonably incident” to mining operations, as required by the 1872
Mining Law. Thousands of mining cabins in the West, like this one,
have been illegally converted to recreational use, Egnew adds. For
over a year, the Forest Service headquarters in Price warned the
men they needed to justify their cabin use in a new plan or lose
the structure, but the men did nothing. The agency impounded the
cabin in October 1993, and demolished it a month later. Meanwhile,
at the urging of Holliday and the Shumways, Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch,
R, has started an investigation of the
demolition.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Agency takes out a cabin.
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