Tag: vintage motels

“POKING THROUGH THE RUINS” — w/ Jim Stiles: THE PROSPECTOR LODGE in MOAB (ZX#23 )

I could scarcely believe my ears when I heard, almost twenty years ago, that there were plans to tear down the historic Prospector Lodge and replace it with a hideous chain motel. 

By all accounts, the Prospector was built in the mid-1950s fast on the heels of Charlie Steen’s uranium discovery and the unprecedented boom that followed. The little hamlet of Moab swelled to ten times its size, from just a few years earlier, and the construction of the Prospector was in response to that demand.

My knowledge of the Prospector’s history was pretty thin, so I turned to a facebook page dedicated to Moab’s history and asked for help. As always the response was immediate and full of details that I would never have known without their help.