MINING: Pick’s Pick

In little (pop. 500) Royalton, Minn., Vernon J. Pick was a successful small businessman. To expand his electric-motor-repair business, he had put in $40,000, all the money he had. Then disaster struck. His plant burned down, and it was insured for only $13,500. He collected the insurance money, sold his house and all its contents, and with his wife set off in a small truck and trailer for a Mexican vacation. Says Pick: “I figured it would be thelast one I’d have for some time.”

Pick never got to Mexico. Instead, while passing through Grand Junction, Colo., he heard so much talk about the hunt for uranium that he caught the fever himself.

Torture in the Canyon. Businessman Pick went about prospecting in a businesslike way. He went to the local office of the Atomic Energy Commission, asked a mining engineer named Charles A. Rasor where he should hunt. Rasor walked to a map on the wall and drew a circle around an area near Hanksville, Utah, an isolated town of some 80 people, with no electric light or telephone, near Muddy Creek, a tributary of the Colorado. Said Rasor: “If I were going prospecting, that’s where I’d go.”

Pick bought some camping equipment, a rock pick and a Scintillometer (“sort of a fancy Geiger counter”), spent the next few months trudging around the Colorado and Utah countryside picking up tips from old hands at the game. Finally, with his funds running low, he set off for the remote southeastern Utah site that Rasor had marked on the map. The country was so rugged that Pick had to leave his panel truck, walk in the last 25 miles. As he followed Muddy Creek into a stark and jagged canyon, he had to ford the.stream 21 times in six miles. Says Pick: “My feet got wet over and over again, and then they softened and the sand got in and made blisters. At night I would pick the grains of sand out of the blisters with a matchstick. I’d start out walking in the morning and it was like walking on red-hot marbles. For the first half-hour it was torture. Then my feet would get numb and it was all right.”

Poison in the Water. After a four-day march. Pick was sitting on a rock one day near a crumbling ridge when he noticed that his Scintillometer was not registering properly. He thought it was out of order. But when he walked away from the rock the needle moved again. Then the light dawned. Says he: “I was sitting on a solid chunk of uranium ore.” Pick, figuring it had rolled down from the cliff above him, scrambled up the rock face, chipping off pieces of rock as he went: “It was all beautiful yellow-orange-colored ore.” He staked out a claim and then, to save his feet, fashioned a crude raft to carry him downriver to civilization. The raft upset, dumped Pick and his belongings into the river. Starting out on foot again, he lived for four days on dried milk and oatmeal. When he finally reached his truck again, he was retching with agony from arsenic poisoning picked up by drinking the fouled Muddy Creek water.

After filing his claim papers at Grand Junction, he put up his truck and trailers as collateral, to borrow enough from Grand Junction banks to buy a jeep and rent a bulldozer. Then he built a rough twelve-mile road into his property and started to mine uranium ore. He soon proved up 300,000 tons of uranium ore, one of the richest finds in the Colorado plateau.

Payoff in Manhattan. Last week Prospector Pick went to Manhattan to see about selling his mine. There he sat down with Floyd Odium of Atlas Corp., who has been busily scouting the Colorado plateau, picking up uranium claims in hopes of putting together a major new combine of uranium companies. After several days of dickering, Pick sold his mine to Odium’s Atlas Corp. for a whopping $9,000,000.

Pick will stay on as chief executive officer of the mine, while Atlas will set up a subsidiary to get the property into big-scale production. At present Pick is digging out 1,500 tons of ore a month and selling it to the AEC at a clear profit of $32 a ton. Odium soon hopes to step that up to 10,000 tons a month. Said he: “Uranium is the oil of tomorrow, and tomorrow isn’t very far away.”