Pinyon Plain Mine (formerly Canyon Mine) sat idle for decades on Kaibab National Forest just south of the park. Ore hit the pad in January 2024. Trucks started toward White Mesa Mill, paused after July 30, 2024 during Navajo Nation talks, then resumed February 12, 2025. This page is the haul — not the regional uranium overview.

The short version

• Kaibab National Forest’s public status page (updated July 23, 2026) states the mine is in production and that Energy Fuels Resources resumed ore hauling on February 12, 2025 after pausing transportation following two shipments on July 30, 2024 for discussions with the Navajo Nation.
• First ore on the pad: Energy Fuels notified the Forest Service on January 8, 2024 that uranium ore had been removed from the mine and placed on the ore pad — the first time ore was removed.
• The mine sits inside Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni – Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument (designated August 8, 2023) as a valid existing right; the monument withdraws future mineral entry but does not shut this existing operation.
• Public advocacy and news sources describe a roughly 300-mile truck haul from the mine area toward Energy Fuels’ White Mesa Mill in Utah, including travel that has crossed Navajo Nation lands — the core of the 2024 pause.
• Grand Canyon Trust reporting has cited company statements of about five haul-truck loads per day with an expected increase toward ten; treat daily counts as operator-reported snapshots, not a Forest Service quota.
• Regional mining history and withdrawal policy stay on uranium mining around the canyon. This page is 2024–2026 haul operations.

From idle shaft to ore on the pad

Forest Service chronology is the clean public spine. Energy Fuels completed sinking the shaft (about 1,470 feet) in 2018. In December 2022 the company began preparatory work — waste rock, connecting the shaft to the ore body, a lined ore pad, a ventilation shaft — ahead of ore removal. Commercial extraction is widely dated to late 2023 / December 2023 in Trust and other public accounts; the Forest Service’s hard notification date for ore on the pad is January 8, 2024.

USGS maintains monitoring wells and regular sampling of soils, water, plants, and wildlife around the site; chemistry of the on-site containment pond is published through ScienceBase. Groundwater pumping volumes appear in state permit self-monitoring and are summarized by Grand Canyon Trust (about 7.9 million gallons in 2024; cumulative figures in the tens of millions of gallons since 2016). Those water facts are the mine’s other logistics stream — water out, ore out.

Havasupai opposition to Canyon/Pinyon Plain is long-standing and public; the site sits in a landscape of documented cultural importance including the Red Butte Traditional Cultural Property as described in conservation-group summaries. This page does not map sacred sites.

The haul pause and the February 2025 restart

The 2024–2026 story that is new relative to older uranium overviews is transportation. Forest Service: Energy Fuels voluntarily paused ore transportation after two shipments on July 30, 2024 to allow discussions with the Navajo Nation about hauling across Nation lands. The Forest Service was not a party to those talks. Hauling resumed February 12, 2025.

That pause is the infrastructure event. A mine can extract ore and still fail as a system if the mill is 300-plus miles away and the legal/political path between them is contested. Navajo Nation law and policy on uranium transport, Arizona state and county concern about highway shipments, and Hopi/community notice issues all sit in the 2024 news record. This dossier does not litigate jurisdiction; it records that the company paused, talked, and restarted.

Grand Canyon Trust has published a dedicated haul-route resource and reported that the company told an interagency group it was sending about five loads per day with an expected rise toward ten on the 300-plus-mile mine-to-mill path. Environment America / Environment Arizona describes trucks leaving forest roads, joining State Route 64, then using I-40 and US 89 / US 160 toward Utah. Repeat: those are published corridor names already in advocacy maps — not a how-to, and not a closed-area access guide.

Production scale versus the highway

Trust analysis of Energy Fuels disclosures puts 2024 Pinyon Plain production on the order of 208,000 pounds of uranium, against a life-of-mine yellowcake expectation around 2.5 million pounds in the company’s technical materials — small relative to Canadian high-grade mines and to annual U.S. utility demand. The point for this page is not energy policy. It is that a relatively small mine still generates a daily truck plant on public highways through towns, forests, and tribal lands.

Kaibab NF continues to post quarterly mine reports (through at least Q2 2026 on the public page) and annual operational radiological monitoring reports. ADEQ holds water- and air-quality permits. Those documents are the official paper trail; they do not, by themselves, settle tribal consent questions about the haul.

What’s actually off-limits (and why)

• Mine site — active industrial operation on national forest; not a visitor attraction. Stay out of fenced/operational areas.
• Sacred and culturally important landscapes — including areas tribes have identified around Red Butte. No routes, no coordinates, no “how to see it.”
• Why the distinction matters: this is a permitted mine and a contested haul, not a ruin to document up close. Watch public highways and public dockets; do not treat the pad or shaft as a field site.

Sources

1. Pinyon Plain Mine (formerly Canyon Uranium Mine) — USDA Forest Service, Kaibab National Forest
2. The U.S. Doesn’t Need Pinyon Plain Mine — Grand Canyon Trust
3. Where does the uranium from Pinyon Plain mine get hauled? — Environment Arizona
4. Arizona Governor Urges Review of Grand Canyon Uranium Mine — Grand Canyon Trust
5. Pinyon Plain Mine water quality permitting — Arizona Department of Environmental Quality
6. Arizona Regulators Are Raising Contaminant Limits for a Uranium Mine With an Arsenic Problem — Inside Climate News