Fry Canyon was a uraniumboom town during the 1950s, and the Fry Canyon Lodge opened in 1955, but it has since closed in 2007. The tiny hamlet, now a ghost town, is 19 miles (31 km) west-southwest of Woodenshoe Butte, and 8 miles (13 km) west-northwest of Natural Bridges National Monument.
The activities of a uranium ore upgrader mill (1957-1960) and a subsequent copper heap leach operation (1963-1968) at Fry Spring, two miles southeast of Fry Canyon, caused uranium, copper and radium contamination of groundwater in colluvial channel deposits within Fry Creek.[2] The U.S. Geological Survey (with funding from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and other agencies) installed three permeable reactive barriers, containing three different reactive materials (foamed zero-valent iron (ZVI) pellets, bone charcoal pellets, amorphous ferric oxyhydroxide (AFO) slurry mixed with pea gravel), at the site, which is managed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.[3]
