The reclamation of Montana’s hardrock mines will cost billions, and is complicated by the fact that no one really knows how to do it, or who should foot the bill.
Protester starts her sentence
On Jan. 5, a former teacher began serving a 30-day sentence for refusing to part from a 400-year-old Engelmann spruce she was trying to protect from loggers. Joni Clark’s sentence of 30 days is the stiffest penalty yet for a tree-sitter in Colorado. She was found guilty of violating the Forest Service’s Special Closure Order…
A road to nowhere?
For more than two decades, the Utah Department of Transportation has planned to widen the two-lane road that winds through narrow Provo Canyon. Best known as the site of Sundance, a resort founded by actor Robert Redford, the canyon is one of the most spectacular in the Wasatch Mountains. One-third of the “road-improvement” project is…
Golden Dreams, Poisoned Streams
What is New Mexico’s hardrock mining reclamation law? Why was BHP Copper Co. allowed to dump untreated tailings in Papua, New Guinea’s Ok Tedi River, destroying local agriculture and the communities dependent on it? How harmful is chromium to a stream? You can find the answers in Golden Dreams, Poisoned Streams, the Mineral Policy Center’s…
The Wayward West
Tension over logging the Taylor Ranch in southern Colorado continues. Costilla County sheriff’s deputies and the Colorado Bureau of Investigation haven’t found who sabotaged seven electrical power poles on the property last month. Ranch manager Vic White says someone with a saw severed three poles and cut the others three-quarters through. White calls the action…
Wolf wars enter next round
As the fallout settles from federal Judge William Downes’ decision ordering that nearly 200 introduced wolves be removed from Yellowstone and Idaho, members of the environmental community who have been at each other’s throats are putting aside their differences and preparing to appeal the decision (HCN, 12/22/97: Judge says wolf reintroduction was illegal). Immediately following…
State fights nuclear waste shipments
In a measure environmental groups say will put 50 million Americans at risk of radiation exposure, Congress recently authorized storage of 50,000 tons of nuclear waste at the Nevada Test Site. Opponent Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., dubbed the bill “Mobile Chernobyl,” because it funds the transportation of spent nuclear fuel rods from power plants in…
The landscapes of our dreams
It’s an awful job, but somebody has to do it – register an afterthought to Kathie Durbin’s story on the Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge, “Cows depart, but can antelope recover?” (HCN, 11/24/97). I have no problem accepting as fact that livestock grazing wrecked the place, that cows broke the cryptogamic crust, that Eurasian cheatgrass…
Those ideas aren’t wacky
Dear HCN, As one of the founders of King County Property Rights Alliance (King County surrounds Seattle), I take exception to Ken Toole’s essay on the Far Right and its wacky ideas (HCN, 12/8/97). I endorse the bulk of those “wacky” ideas, even though I haven’t been to church, fundamentalist or otherwise, for a good…
Audubon should have thought it over
Dear HCN, It is more than a little ironic that the arguments of a group – the Audubon Society – trying to enforce the letter of the Endangered Species Act yielded a result contrary to the one that they had hoped for. Their intention was to extend coverage of the act to all wolves, including…
Recreationists are smarter than cows
Dear HCN, Our backyards make up the majority of the nation’s public lands, and yet we Westerners don’t know how to talk about the future of those lands. That was clearly shown by two essays on recreation user fees in the Oct. 13, 1997, High Country News. Terry Anderson and Steve Hinchman both assumed that…
We’re cheap
Dear HCN, As a frequent user of trout streams on public lands, I have been amazed at the reluctance of some of my fellow fishermen to pay user fees. People who use $400 fly rods with $200 reels holding $45 lines, whose $150 vests and $100 boots and $200 waders ride in $20,000 cars, will…
Dear friends
Reading into 1998 The bad thing about taking a break, which we accomplished by skipping the Jan. 5 issue, is coming back to a towering stack of accumulated papers from Western cities and small towns, as well as The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Washington Post Weekly. As we troll for story leads,…
After the gold rush
Note: see the end of this feature story for a list of several accompanying sidebar articles. NEW WORLD MINING DISTRICT, MONTANA The landmarks here are about what you’d find in many of the other hundreds of thousands of abandoned or inactive mines in the West. Old pits, collapsed tunnels and piles of waste rock cling…
Superfund strives for accountability
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. In 1980, two years after toxins oozed out of a landfill and seeped into a suburban housing development called Love Canal in Niagara Falls in upstate New York, Congress passed the Superfund Law. Officially known as CERCLA, the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability…
This heavy-metal collection includes a shovel that dug the Panama Canal
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. SILVER STAR, Mont. – When you drive Montana Highway 41 past Lloyd Harkins’ yard, here in the heart of mining country, you can’t help noticing that Harkins has a peculiar idea of mine reclamation. Right next to the highway Harkins has stood a humongous…
Haggling over the Grand Staircase-Escalante
Conoco has turned its back on an oil well in Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. In December, Conoco engineers “packed up their oil rig and they are out of there,” says Bureau of Land Management spokesman Don Banks. “The hole has been capped without a blade of monument grass or a dollar of taxpayer green…
A few plants love mine waste
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Gazing around old diggings just outside Yellowstone National Park, Ray Brown says, “The ecosystem hasn’t been damaged, it’s been destroyed. It’s typical on these sites.” Yet he points to a small grasslike plant and says enthusiastically, “This is the miracle!’ Brown is a plant…
A ‘liberal’ court gets some breathing room
Western conservatives in the U.S. Senate tried to add language to a spending bill last fall to neutralize an old nemesis – the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. But the senators, facing heavy opposition in the House of Representatives, had to compromise: a commission will review the appeals court system and the San Francisco-based…
Turning the Old West into the New West
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. ANACONDA, Mont. – Until this town got involved, mine reclamation was fairly dull. You could say, reclamation lacked imagination. No flair. Then Anaconda, a town that rose and fell on the smelting of ore from the mines in nearby Butte, got the idea of…
Summitville: an expensive lesson
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. In mine reclamation, lessons are learned through failure. Nowhere has the failure been more spectacular than at the Summitville Gold Mine in southern Colorado. The mine is being reclaimed now, but at a huge cost, borne almost entirely by people and companies that had…
Can tailings piles be historic artifacts?
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. LEADVILLE, Colo. – Here below a ring of magnificent peaks, the scenery features a maze of tailings piles and the decaying architecture of mines, mills and smelters that outsiders might see as ugly and meaningless. But locals like Carl Miller enjoy the sight of…
A radical approach to mine reclamation
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. SILVERTON, Colo. – The Sunnyside Mine near here is an odd place for marking progress. The mine offers gold, silver, copper, lead and zinc, but has a treacherous history. Different companies have tried to make it work since 1874 and have shut it down…
Homestake shows how good a mine can be
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. MCLAUGHLIN MINE, Calif. – Homestake Mining Co.” s Ray Krauss ambles along the banks of a lake his firm built to supply water to its McLaughlin Mine in Northern California. He talks glowingly about his 17 years as manager of environmental affairs. First he…
This reclamation plan uses waste to bury waste
Note: This article accompanies another feature story in this special issue on hardrock mining and reclamation. WELLPINIT, Wash. – At 7:30 on the evening of April 4, 1954, twin brothers Jim and John LaBret loaded a finicky $54 Geiger counter into Jim’s blue “46 Chrysler and set off on a moonlight mission to find uranium.…
Is our love of the West destroying Chile?
I was drafting this essay, when Bill Brewster, former congressman from Oklahoma and now president of a Washington lobbying company, stuck his head into my office: “Do you know any companies that would be interested in buying gold concessions in Azerbaijan? Their Minister of Privitization is a friend of mine, and he wants to put…
Give the mining industry a second chance…
Dear HCN, As a thrice-starved-out Montanan, I have a different take on mining than writer Heather Abel in your Dec. 22, 1997, issue. There are aspects of mining and its politics that High Country News should not have glossed over. A prime example is the so-called Clean Water Initiative, I-122. It failed in the 1996…
…but let’s not forget about the past
Dear HCN, In your Dec. 22, 1997, issue, I was quoted as saying, “What it might take is for some people to die before people start sitting up and saying, ‘Take that pollution out of rivers.’ ” I didn’t mean by that there will have to be violent confrontations, or even that people will immediately…
Heard Around the West
Ski-hats off to 33-year-old Karen Hartley, the stranded Utah skier who kept warm for 18 hours on Christmas Eve by dancing in the dark and singing “old disco songs, show tunes, popular and current stuff, Christmas tunes and even camp songs,” reports AP. She never panicked; she kept her head, and when a helicopter arrived…