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

Grand Canyon National Park doesn't advertise a number, but the National Park Service has one anyway: 38 documented sites, 75 individual mine features, scattered across a park most visitors think of as scenery, not industrial history. Nobody's mapping them for you — this is what the public record says about how many there are and what the park is doing about it.

The short version

• NPS has formally documented 38 Abandoned Mineral Lands (AML) sites containing 75 individual features — adits, shafts, pits, tunnels, prospects, tailings piles — inside Grand Canyon National Park.
• Twelve of those 38 sites are flagged by NPS as requiring active mitigation.
• Grand Canyon is one small piece of a much bigger federal problem: a 2010-2013 nationwide NPS inventory found 37,050 abandoned mine and oil-and-gas-well features across 133 national park units.
• The park’s Superintendent’s Compendium defines “mine” broadly and closes all of them, park-wide, to public access without special written permission — on top of separate, named closures at specific sites.
• A 2009 ARRA-funded push closed dozens of hardrock features across nine Intermountain Region parks, including Grand Canyon, using bat-gates, grates, backfilling, and fencing.
• No public source found this session breaks the 75 Grand Canyon features down by exact type, or gives a current per-park tally of how many have actually been closed.

Why there are so many holes in a national park

Grand Canyon’s mining history runs from an 1880s copper-and-asbestos prospecting boom through a uranium rush that didn’t wind down until the mid-1980s. Copper, lead, and asbestos were pulled out in relatively small quantities almost from the start. The serious money was uranium, concentrated in a distinctive local geologic feature called a solution-collapse breccia pipe — a vertical column formed where ancient cave systems in the Redwall Limestone collapsed under overlying rock, later filled with metal-bearing groundwater. Breccia pipes are unusual worldwide but abundant across northern Arizona and southern Utah, and often carry both uranium and copper together, plus the occasional mineral found nowhere else — grandviewite, named for the Grand View Mine, is known only from Grand Canyon.

Most of these operations were small and financially marginal, echoing the Bass and Hance mining histories elsewhere on this site. But “marginal” doesn’t mean “gone.” Every adit, shaft, pit, tunnel, prospect, and tailings pile anyone dug still exists somewhere in the canyon, decades or a century after the miners walked away.

Counting the holes: 38 sites, 75 features

The park’s own current figure, published on the NPS Geodiversity Atlas, is specific: 38 documented Abandoned Mineral Lands sites, containing 75 individual features, inside Grand Canyon National Park. Twelve of those sites require active mitigation, per the same source.

That’s the Grand Canyon slice of a much larger federal accounting problem. Between 2010 and 2013, NPS ran its first comprehensive, boots-on-the-ground inventory of abandoned mineral lands across the entire park system, and came back with 37,050 individual abandoned mine and oil-and-gas-well features spread across 133 national park units nationwide. Of that total, roughly 1,800 features had already received long-term remedial action, another 3,800 or so across 76 parks still needed it, and the remaining bulk — over 31,000 — were catalogued for site characterization but required no action. Grand Canyon’s 75 features are a small fraction of that count, but the park is one of the more heavily mined units in the system, given the copper-asbestos-uranium sequence above.

What the public record doesn’t offer, at least in anything found this session, is a type-by-type breakdown of those 75 Grand Canyon features — how many are open shafts versus sealed adits versus surface prospects versus tailings piles. The technical report that almost certainly has that level of detail, Burghardt, Norby, and Pranger’s 2014 NPS comprehensive inventory and assessment, is cited by name on the Geodiversity Atlas page but wasn’t independently opened this session.

What closing a mine actually looks like

The park doesn’t have one universal fix for a hazardous mine opening. The standard toolkit, used region-wide and applicable at Grand Canyon, includes bat-accessible gates and cupolas over adits (horizontal bars spaced wide enough for bats to fly through but too narrow for a person), grates over vertical shafts, fencing, and backfilling. Backfilling isn’t as simple as dumping fill down a hole — where a feature is closed that way, staff document it photographically first, and fill typically stops within three feet of the surface on one side to leave a wildlife ramp rather than sealing the opening flush.

Money for this work has come in uneven pulses. The largest push came in 2009, funded through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act: $5,006,000 region-wide to fence and sign 144 hardrock features at Saguaro alone and build long-term closures at 85 hardrock features spread across nine Intermountain Region parks together — Black Canyon of the Gunnison, Chiricahua, Coronado, Fort Bowie, Glacier, Glen Canyon, Grand Canyon, Organ Pipe Cactus, and Saguaro — plus reclaiming 13 gravel pits at Great Sand Dunes. That same year, Bat Conservation International separately funded a single $40,000 bat-gate at one adit in Grand Canyon. Neither region-wide total is broken out to show exactly how many closures landed inside Grand Canyon specifically, one of the real gaps in the public record here.

Also in 2009, NPS opened public scoping on an Environmental Assessment to close hazardous mine openings jointly across four parks — Coronado National Memorial, Grand Canyon, Organ Pipe Cactus, and Saguaro — with the same toolkit on the table. NPS’s own framing of the hazards is blunt: falling into shafts, loose rock falling from adit roofs, high radon concentrations, toxic metals, and asbestos inhalation. It also flags something easy to miss: some mine features sit in areas with wilderness character, some serve as important wildlife habitat (bats especially), and some are eligible for the National Register of Historic Places. A hole in the ground can be a hazard, a historic structure, and a bat colony’s home, all three at once — why “just fill it in” isn’t always the answer.

One mine, studied up close

The 38-and-75 figures are useful, but they’re abstractions. A 2003 peer-reviewed NPS Park Science study of the historic Grand View Mine — a copper claim staked by prospector Pete Berry in April 1890 along the still-maintained Grand View Trail, acquired by NPS in 1939 — shows what “AML mitigation” actually involves on the ground. Researchers from Fort Lewis College and New Mexico Highlands University used a portable gamma-ray spectrometer to measure radioactivity in the mine’s waste rock and found levels up to 125 times the local background reading, with the Grand View Trail itself crossing directly over some of the hottest waste-rock piles.

Their recommendations weren’t dramatic: reroute a short trail segment around the worst waste rock, post warning signs, distribute better information to backpackers. As of that 2003 study, the mine’s shafts, entrances, and adits were still open and accessible, and staff relied mainly on backcountry-permit paperwork rather than on-site signage. It’s a small-scale illustration of the same triage happening, in theory, at all 75 documented features: figure out which are genuinely dangerous, and pick a fix that doesn’t erase the history along with the hazard.

What’s actually off-limits (and why)

The park’s Superintendent’s Compendium handles this at two levels. First, a blanket rule: it defines “mine” for management purposes as any anthropogenic feature excavated for mineral extraction — adits, shafts, pits, tunnels, prospects, and tailings piles all count — and then closes public presence, use, and access in every mine meeting that definition, park-wide, without special written permission from the superintendent. The stated reasons are protecting human health and safety, unrecorded archaeological features, and wildlife habitat.

On top of that general rule, the compendium names several closures by site: the Bass Asbestos Mine in Hakatai Canyon (a 500-foot buffer, listed twice), the Orphan Mine’s upper and lower sites (fully fenced), and the Hance Mine (a hard river-corridor closure, Mile 77.5 through 78.6). The compendium also closes the Hopi Salt Mines, a traditional Hopi cultural site along the river — a different kind of place entirely, a sacred salt-gathering location the tribe itself describes, not a hardrock mineral claim, and excluded from the industrial-mining count above out of respect for how the Hopi define its significance.

Beyond those named sites, the other roughly seventy documented features scattered across the park don’t get individual write-ups in the compendium — they fall under the general “all mines” rule instead. For a fuller rundown of what’s closed park-wide and why, see the general off-limits overview.

Sources

1. NPS Geodiversity Atlas — Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona — National Park Service
2. Abandoned mineral lands — NPS Park Science journal — National Park Service
3. Intermountain Region Summary — Abandoned Mineral Lands — National Park Service
4. Abandoned Mine Lands Closure Plan, Project Scoping Newsletter (August 10, 2009) — National Park Service
5. The Legacy of the Grand View Mine, Park Science Vol. 22 No. 1 (Fall 2003) — National Park Service
6. Grand Canyon National Park Superintendent's Compendium, effective June 16, 2026 — National Park Service

Two miles from the crowds at Grand Canyon Village, a fenced hole in the South Rim used to be one of the richest uranium mines in the country. It started as a bust of a copper claim in 1893, became a tourist lodge, then spent thirteen years as a Cold War uranium mine, and the National Park Service is still out there every month, checking the fence and reapplying soil glue.

The short version

• The Orphan Mine started as a copper claim staked by Dan Hogan in 1893, decades before it was uranium ore that made it famous.
• It sat on privately patented land inside what became Grand Canyon National Park — a legal oddity that let active mining continue right next to the rim trail for years.
• From 1956 to 1969 it produced roughly 495,000 tons of ore and 4.26 million pounds of uranium oxide, run out via an aerial tramway and later a deep vertical shaft with its own headframe.
• The mine closed in 1969 with no reclamation. NPS didn’t acquire the land until 1987 and didn’t start seriously cleaning it up until 2008-2009.
• Despite the “Superfund” label you’ll see repeated online, EPA’s own database shows Orphan Mine was never placed on the National Priorities List — NPS runs its own federal cleanup instead.
• Downstream, Horn Creek carries some of the highest uranium readings USGS has ever measured in the canyon — though the science says at least part of that is the ore body itself, not just mining residue.

From copper bust to Cold War asset

Dan Hogan staked his claim in 1893 and called it the Orphan lode, after the isolated, freestanding pillar of rock it sat on. There wasn’t enough copper to make the digging worthwhile, so Hogan pivoted: by 1936 he’d built a small tourist camp on the site, betting that canyon sightseers would pay better than a played-out copper prospect. He was right for a while, then sold out in 1946 for $55,000 to Bertha Madeleine Jacobs.

The site’s second life started in 1951, when geologists found high-grade uranium deposits in the old workings. A mining company took over the claim in the mid-1950s, and by April 1956 the first ore shipment was headed to a processing mill. For the next thirteen years, Orphan Mine ran as one of the highest-grade uranium producers in the country.

Because the underlying claim had been patented back in 1906, the land was private property sitting inside a national park boundary that grew up around it later. That’s the part that made Orphan Mine strange even by mining-district standards: an active industrial uranium operation, complete with worker housing, hoist equipment, and truck traffic, running within sight of the rim while tourists walked the same road.

Tramway, shaft, headframe

Getting people and ore in and out of a mine whose shaft ran somewhere around 1,500 to 1,600 feet deep (sources differ) wasn’t simple. From 1955 until 1959, an aerial tramway carried workers down to the operation — for several years it was the only way in or out of the only working mine inside the park boundary. In 1959 the company finished a vertical shaft with an elevator, and a headframe went up over it to run the hoist. The tramway kept running as a secondary system until it was finally dismantled in 1965.

There was even a wilder proposal on the table: in 1961, Western Gold, the operator by then, floated plans for an eighteen-story, six-hundred-room hotel cantilevered out over the canyon rim near the mine. It never got built. According to regional histories, Congress did approve a compromise in the early 1960s that let the mine’s operations extend into park land, which kept an active uranium mine legally running inside a national park into the late 1960s.

Mining stopped for good in 1969. The site was walked away from with no reclamation — no backfilling, no equipment removal, no site closure in the modern regulatory sense. It just sat there, fenced or not, for the better part of two decades.

What the mine actually produced

The number that gets repeated most often online — 800,000 tons of ore, 13 million pounds of uranium — doesn’t match the government’s own figures. NPS and USGS put the real production at approximately 495,106 tons of ore, yielding 4,257,571 pounds of uranium oxide (U3O8) between 1956 and 1969, plus byproduct copper, silver, and vanadium. It’s still an enormous haul for a single South Rim claim — just not the inflated version that circulates in trivia lists.

NPS takes over, slowly

The Park Service didn’t acquire the Orphan Mine property until 1987, nearly two decades after the last shipment left. Environmental investigation started even before that, in 1981, under the same federal law — CERCLA — that governs Superfund cleanups nationally. But “the same law” doesn’t mean “the same program.”

Here’s the distinction that gets lost in most retellings: EPA’s own Superfund site database lists Orphan Mine as not on the National Priorities List. It was archived years ago with a “no further remedial action planned” designation and EPA’s determination that “no further federal action will be taken at this site.” That’s EPA saying it’s not their project.

It’s NPS’s project instead. As the federal agency that owns the contaminated land, NPS acts as its own CERCLA lead agency — investigating, planning, and funding removal work directly rather than handing it to EPA’s Superfund program. In practice that’s meant a slow, phased cleanup: equipment and debris removal in 2009, a year of radon monitoring and soil sampling in 2011, and an ongoing engineering evaluation to decide what a full cleanup should look like. As of the most recent public update, the upper mine area is still double-fenced and gated, soil stabilizer gets reapplied every couple of years (most recently September 2025), and rangers walk the fence line monthly from March through October.

The Horn Creek problem

Downhill from the mine, Horn Creek is the part of this story that shows up on hiking forums, usually with a warning attached: don’t drink it. USGS’s most recent regional water study found the highest uranium concentration it has ever measured anywhere in the Grand Canyon — 293 micrograms per liter — at a spring in Horn Creek, roughly ten times the EPA’s drinking-water standard of 30 µg/L. USGS notes plainly that Horn Creek sits near the Orphan Mine workings, “which may have pathways for water migration through the mine.”

But the fuller picture, from a 2023 peer-reviewed USGS study, is more interesting than “the mine poisoned the creek.” Uranium levels are highest right where groundwater first emerges from bedrock at the top of the watershed, then drop by roughly a factor of ten by the time that water works its way down through the alluvium lower in the drainage. The isotope chemistry suggests at least part of that uranium is coming from natural interaction with the same mineralized rock — a breccia pipe deposit — that made the mine worth digging in the first place. Separately, elevated tritium in the water points to a real component of modern water that has likely passed through the old mine workings themselves. Both things are true at once: Horn Creek’s water is naturally uranium-rich because of the geology under it, and the abandoned mine adds its own contribution on top of that. An independent 2016 sample by a UC Berkeley radiation-watch group measured a lower 23 µg/L at the time and location it sampled — a reminder that these numbers swing hard depending on flow, season, and exactly where along the creek you test. USGS’s own monitoring record since 2018 has swung from roughly 150 µg/L up to that 293 µg/L peak.

Either way, the signs at Horn Creek say what they say for a reason. It’s marked “Do Not Drink,” full stop.

What’s actually off-limits (and why)

The current Grand Canyon National Park Superintendent’s Compendium — the park’s official rulebook for closures — spells out the Orphan Mine restriction in plain terms. Both the upper site (about 200 yards north of Hermit Road, between Maricopa and Powell Points) and the lower site (roughly 1,100 feet below the rim) are enclosed by a three-strand wire fence and closed to public entry, full stop, under 36 CFR § 1.5(a)(2). The park’s own explanation is short: it was an active uranium mine from 1956 to 1969, and the area still has open shafts, sharp metal, and “varying levels of radioactivity.”

That’s not a blanket ban on visiting the general area near Maricopa and Powell Points — the rim trail and overlooks nearby stay open. It’s specifically the fenced mine site itself: the shafts, the old workings, and the ground immediately around them. The fence lines and locked gate are the actual enforcement mechanism, backed up by the regulation; NPS staff and researchers can still get in with written permission for park management or study purposes, same as they can at other closed sites in the park.

Nobody’s hiding an Egyptian city under the canyon. What’s actually down there is a lot simpler and, honestly, more instructive: an old copper claim that became a Cold War uranium mine, an agency that took eighteen years to get around to buying the land, and a cleanup that’s still going more than half a century after the last truckload of ore left the rim.

Sources

1. Community Fact Sheet: Orphan Mine CERCLA Site (April 2025 Update) — National Park Service
2. Grand Canyon National Park Superintendent's Compendium, effective June 16, 2026 — National Park Service
3. Science for Decision Making on Uranium Mining in Arizona: Orphan Mine — U.S. Geological Survey
4. Water resources related to breccia pipe uranium mining in the Grand Canyon region, USGS Fact Sheet 2024-3055 — U.S. Geological Survey
5. Anthropogenic influence on groundwater geochemistry, Horn Creek watershed near Orphan Mine — U.S. Geological Survey / Beisner, Davidson & Tillman, 2023
6. Orphan Mine Superfund Site Profile (EPA ID AZN000908478) — U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
7. Update: At Grand Canyon National Park, an Abandoned Uranium Mine Must be Cleaned Up — National Parks Traveler (reproducing official 2008 NPS announcement)
8. Orphan Mine — Nature, Culture and History at the Grand Canyon (Grand Canyon Historical Society)
9. The Orphan Lode Uranium Mine in the Grand Canyon — Intermountain Histories
10. Grand Canyon Horn Creek — UC Berkeley RadWatch