Paradox Valley is a basin located in Montrose County in the U.S. state of Colorado. The dry, sparsely populated valley is named after the apparently paradoxical course of the Dolores River—instead of flowing down the length of the valley, the river cuts across the middle. The valley is the site of a Bureau of Reclamation salinity-control project which has caused thousands of earthquakes, and is the proposed location of a new uranium mill which would be the first built in the United States in over 25 years. Geography and climate Paradox Valley trends northwest-southeast and measures about wide and long. It lies along the extreme western edge of Colorado, about south of the city of Grand Junction. The La Sal Range of Utah rises in the northwest. State Highway 90 follows Paradox Valley on its way from Naturita to the Utah state line, crossing the Dolores River Bridge near the small unincorporated town of Bedrock. The town of Paradox lies a few miles north of the highway. Elevations on the valley floor range from about at the Dolores River to nearly at the southeast end. Steep parallel sandstone and shale walls bound the valley to the northeast and southwest. The valley was named in 1875 by geologist and surveyor Albert Charles Peale, after he noted that the Dolores River had a "desire to perform strange and unexpected things" in the area. Instead of flowing down the valley, the river emerges from a narrow gap in one wall, cuts perpendicularly across the middle, and exits through another gap. As a consequence of this unusual geography, the valley cannot be easily irrigated by the Dolores River, but springs and streams fed by snowmelt from the La Sal Range support farming in the northwestern third Near the center of the valley, the town of Bedrock experiences average highs ranging from in December to in July. Average lows range from in December to in July. An average of of precipitation, including of snow, fall annually at Bedrock. Geology The apparent paradox of Paradox Valley can be explained by salt tectonics. The valley is a collapsed anticline, a type of geological fold. About 300 million years ago, during the middle Pennsylvanian period, when the river already existed, high pressures on lands to the northeast caused underlying salt deposits to flow towards where the valley is today. The salt encountered a buried fault-block ridge and was