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In 1982, the tribal government demanded $6.7 million from a federal claims court to seal and clean about 300 mines. The tribe argued that federal inspectors had failed to enforce safety standards in order to keep down the price of bomb material.

From 1953 to 1958, the Tutts leased a parcel known as King Tutt No. 1 to a succession of operators, the largest of which was Vanadium Corp. of America. In 1989, Navajo inspectors visited the abandoned site and found huge mounds of dust and ore rich in uranium and other heavy metals — vanadium, selenium and arsenic. They also found products of uranium's decay — radium, radon gas, thorium and lead. About 200 mines had been bored into the mesa. Hoskie suggested lumping them into one Superfund application. She believed that "the sheer number of sites" would make the application hard to reject.

Over the next decade, the tribe's workers sealed about 900 uranium mines, at a cost of more than $25 million. The achievement was substantial: Most of the old pits and shafts no longer presented a temptation to people and animals seeking shelter and water.

In 1999, Phelps Dodge Corp. swallowed the vestiges of Vanadium Corp. of America. Phelps Dodge is currently spending millions of dollars to clean up 10 former Vanadium Corp. uranium sites in remote canyons in Colorado and Utah. The company acted at the urging of the U. S. Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service, which were concerned about the safety of hikers and campers.

In 1998, the EPA finally began to test for radiation and water contamination throughout the reservation. Navajo leaders saw reason to hope for the thorough cleanup that had eluded them for so long. But the sampling effort ended prematurely after an argument between tribal and U.S. officials over control of information.

The planning committee contacted Franz Geiger, a chemist at Northwestern University, who sampled six wells in June 2004 and found uranium and arsenic. The concentrations were particularly high in a well serving 200 students at Red Rock Day School

Before United Nuclear Corp. began mining there in 1968, the valley where the big waste pile now stands was called Red Water, for the color of the local pond after a heavy rain. But residents soon adopted the name of their noisy new neighbor, Church Rock Mine.