The Monument Valley district is located inside the Navajo Nation and includes parts of San Juan County, Utah and Apache and Navajo Counties, Arizona. The vast majority of the uranium that has been produced comes from Arizona. However, Utah contains some important deposits. A single channel which extends from Rock Door Mesa westward to the neighboring Oljeto Mesa and the Skyline Mine, Mitchell Butte, and the Holiday Mesas contained nearly 51 percent all uranium produced. The first mining occurred in Utah in 1944, when uranium was used to color ceramics and glass. Production in Utah resumed in 1949, with the procurement programs of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. During the years 1944, and 1949 through 1966, a total of 54, 033 tons of uranium ore containing 322,802 pounds of uranium oxide (U308) averaging 0.30 percent U308 was produced from 14 mines. These ores also contained 532,739 pounds of vanadium oxide (V205) and an unknown amount of copper. By 1966, the economic profitability of the area had decreased, the ore had been mined out, and the mines, tailing piles, waste, and mills were subsequently abandoned.

The efforts of Elsie Mae Begay, an elder Navajo woman who has lobbied tirelessly for cleanup of the abandoned Skyline uranium mine has spent more than 30 years living among the mine waste, which she says has sickened and killed her family members. Begay took her story of the dangers of uranium across her reservation, to college campuses and Congress, along with a documentary outlining her family's plight, until the federal government allocated $7.5 million for cleanup of the site. The AML remediated the site using a cable system to manually haul the contaminated waste up back up the Oljato Mesa and seal off the mine portals with foam. A lined repository atop the mesa now holds 25,000 cubic yards of uranium waste that was piled up on the valley floor and gathered from around an arroyo.

The cleanup marks a significant remediation project on a difficult site on Navajo Nation where abandoned uranium mines number in the hundreds. Though the cleanup of the Skyline and the Rock Door mine sites near the Arizona-Utah border means the residents living below Oljato Mesa are subject to reduced exposure to radiation, inaccessible tailings piles still cascade down the mesa above the Begay family home. Elsie and her family have relocated a few hundred feet from the mesa but is unable to move further away because residents are restricted to live within certain boundaries on Navajo Nation.

Information gathered from The Uranium—Vanadium Deposits of the Utah Portion of the Monument Valley District, by William L. Chenoweth, Mining Districts of Utah, 2006
Pages 551-564

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