The U.S. Forest Service pulled the beds and refrigerator out of Jerry Holliday's southeastern Utah cabin and then flattened it with dynamite. Now it wants him to clean the mess up.
"I'll tell you, I'm a bit ticked off right now," said Holliday, a Blanding businessman. "You just don't blow somebody's property up and walk away."The Forest Service said the explosion last month that demolished Holliday's 25-foot by 25-foot cinderblock cabin on North Elk Ridge has been years coming. It says the cabin, located on the Manti La Sal National Forest, was being used in violation of federal mining laws and Forest Service regulations.
It wasn't until after negotiations broke down that the cabin was blown up, said Forest Service geologist Jim Egnew.
Holliday and two partners, Gene and Kenny Shumway of Blanding, built the cabin 30 years ago on Forest Service land on which they held mining claims. The trio pulled uranium from the mountain for years, he said Friday.
"This was no fly-by-night thing," he said. "We've held those claims since the '50s and we pulled a million dollars a year in ore out from underneath it" until falling uranium prices forced them to close down in the early 1980s.
Since then, Holliday said they've used the cabin for assessment and road work, but that no mining has taken place. He points out that his mining claims are still valid.
But Egnew contends Holliday and the Shumways were maintaining the mining claims so they could use the cabin for recreational purposes. He said the Forest Service documented that the cabin has been used by a local church group and by hunters.
He said merely having a claim is not reason enough to maintain a structure on Forest Service land. Unless mining is taking place, he said, construction and maintenance of mining structures is forbidden by the mining law of 1872 and Forest Service regulations.
That's hogwash, Holliday said. "It may be his interpretation of things, but it's not the law," he said.
Holliday also disputes that the cabin was being used for recreational purposes. He said the church group merely camped in the area, which has a lawn and horseshoe pit, but did not use the cabin.
A criminal trespass charge filed by the Forest Service was thrown out of court, he said.
Egnew said the service negotiated and corresponded with Holliday and the others for years but that the concerns were ignored.
He said they were notified that a plan of operation they filed more than a year ago was "inadequate," but he received no response.
"They essentially have not answered any of our requests," he said. "Last February, we told them the cabin had to be gone in June. Nothing was done. We told them again in September, but again, nothing."
So on Tuesday, the Forest Service confiscated the contents of the cabin and then razed it.
"And now they say I got to go up there and clean it up," Holliday complained. He said he's hired a lawyer and plans to sue.
"But we built that cabin to stay," he said. "They're going to get in trouble over this."