"They flagged it, and when they returned to Dugway they left orders for others to go get it," she said. "Eleven days later when they went looking for it, they couldn't find it, but saw a lot of tire tracks around the site. So they called me and asked if I had taken it."

She says she replied, "Are you people out of your minds? No I don't have it. There are so many people who go out there (for hiking and four-wheeling) that it's probably sitting on some guy's mantle, and he doesn't know what he has. That's why you need to clean up that area."

She said she then received a lecture on how it would be illegal for her to take such munitions if she finds them.

The waste option

Faced with not being able to clean up the property or mine it safely, Louise said, the siblings considered another option.

"I also had several conversations with the nuclear waste people that were trying to put that storage of nuclear waste in Skull Valley," she says. The state has fought for years to block an above-ground storage area proposal by Private Fuels Storage on the Goshute Reservation. The company is a consortium of Midwest nuclear power utilities.

"Because they've kind of been hitting one roadblock after another to put it in Skull Valley, the Dugway property that is owned by the Cannons is looking better and better to them," she says.

Louise says her family's property is more stable geologically than the Skull Valley site, and the land sits beneath a "no fly zone." The state has fought the Skull Valley site in part by contending it is too near faults and that a plane crash into it could be catastrophic.

If Dugway Proving Ground expansion took the Cannon property — or surrounded it — that would almost surely prevent a private repository there, too.

In a Catch-22

Louise says, "We're in a Catch-22. We can't get the property cleaned up. We can't lease it. We can't even get rid of it. I even worry we might be liable if someone is hurt out there by some of the contamination."

Douglas says, "The property is now useless to us. No development or potential sale can take place because of the danger and because necessary insurance cannot be obtained inexpensively to protect personnel from injury or death."

They worry that the latest disclosure by the Army that it is considering expanding Dugway boundaries is aimed, at least in part, at them and their property. (The Deseret Morning News has filed a Freedom of Information Act request for specifics about the proposal, but the Army has not yet responded.)

"My fear is that what they are trying to do is surround us and landlock us," preventing access to the mines and any hope of developing them, Louise says. "It's privately owned, and they don't want to clean it up."

She adds, "What I want them to do is clean it up. The price of precious minerals is going up, especially gold. It's not only a large mine, but it has shown promise in the past" and managed to produce $246,000 in lease fees despite the contamination worries between 1969 and 1993. Some promising veins have been identified.

But the Cannons say the jury is still out on whether they will really get the gold mine — or just the shaft.

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E-mail: lee@desnews.com