Grants

The 1950 find the panel ends on was a sheepherder's. Paddy Martinez, a Navajo who ran a sheep camp near Haystack and recruited workers for the carrot farms, picked up a yellow rock near his hogan and carried it into town. The ground belonged, for mineral purposes, to the Santa Fe Railroad, and the Haystack mine was opened there. The boom he started ran nearly thirty years, until the uranium market collapsed in 1979; the Navajo Nation banned uranium mining on its land in 2005. His family says it never shared in what was found.

What the plaque says

Official Scenic Historic Marker Grants Population 11,451 - Elevation 6500 ft. Located just north of the great lava bed known as the malpais, Grants began as a coaling station for the Santa Fe Railroad. Around1880 it was known as Grant's Camp, after the Canadian bridge contractor Angus A. Grant. In 1950, the area's vast uranium deposits were discovered.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• El Malpais National Monument — 15 mi
  The badlands south of Grants: lava 3,900 years old from McCartys Crater, a tube system at least seventeen miles long, and an old trail across four lava flows between Zuni and Acoma.
• Acoma Sky City — 21 mi
  Haak'u, the village on a sandstone mesa west of Albuquerque, seen only on the pueblo's own tours, with a mission whose roof beams were carried on foot from Mount Taylor.

More markers nearby

• San Rafael — 2.9 mi
• Grants — 2.9 mi
• Bluewater Village — 12 mi
• Old Acoma "Sky City" — 16 mi