Seismographs protect Dry Canyon

DRY CANYON, Carbon County — Clayton Elliott was working alone in this rough side canyon, busy with his measuring tape. He was marking off distances from a wooden stake that had been stuck into the ground beside a sagebrush.

The stake was the site where big vibroseis trucks were to jostle the earth with their steel vibrating pads, delivering 10,000 pounds of pressure per pad, in a seismic survey of underground natural gas reserves. The area is a scenic tributary to Nine Mile Canyon dubbed Dry Canyon. Nine Mile has been dubbed the world's longest art gallery for its plethora of ancient rock art, and Dry Canyon has an abundance, too.

The Stone Canyon 3-D Seismic Survey Project is one of the most controversial in this section of eastern Utah because the region is an archaeological treasure house. It is also important to wildlife, and its natural beauty is impressive.

Elliott was preparing monitoring devices where he would take readings of ground motion, once the trucks began their work.

His employer, Matheson Mining Consultants of Golden, Colo., has authority to shut down the project if vibrations exceed the standards set out in a federal permit. Technically, the limit is a peak particle velocity of 0.75 feet per second, measured 50 feet or farther from the trucks.

"I'm monitor the peak particle velocity with a seismograph," Elliott noted. The seismographs, calibrated yearly, measure "how much force is moving through the ground," he said.

That is one of several stipulations that the Bill Barrett Corp. must meet while surveying the underground gas resources.

Barrett's wells generally would be drilled or deepened on top of the nearby West Tavaputs Plateau, but seismic work must be carried out in the canyons. And the canyons are where most of the renowned rock art panels are located.

The intricate and lovely pictures chipped onto the desert varnish of the sandstone cliffs aren't the only evidence of the vanished Fremont Culture, as the Deseret Morning News discovered while riding with Bureau of Land Management archaeologist Julie Howard and BLM spokeswoman Adrienne Babbitt.

As she drove, Howard pointed out "a pit house village right above us, up to the left, and there are pit house depressions where Fremont Indian people lived almost 1,000 years ago."