When the U.S. Department of the Interior derailed the Crown Jewel gold mine on March 25 with a close reading of the 1872 Mining Law, grassroots activists who’d battled the mine for seven years thought the news was too good to be true. They were right. Just weeks after Interior stiff-armed the Crown Jewel in […]
Energy & Industry
Posted inJune 7, 1999: Mining the past
The real thing
Real “country living” means really having the right and opportunity to grow both food plants and animals. A block of apartments plopped into the middle of a cow pasture 10 miles from the supermarket isn’t real “country.” It’s guaranteed commuter clog and developer’s profit (buying cheap agricultural land and turning it into urban-density, perpetual-rent housing). […]
Posted inJune 7, 1999: Mining the past
Mining the past
Note: an introductory, front-page sidebar, “The hidden West,” accompanies this feature story. BUTTE, Mont. – George Bigcraft, John Bjornstorm, Daniel Budovinac. Near midnight on June 8, 1917, an electric cable caught fire at the 2,400 level of the shaft that served the Granite Mountain and Speculator mines here. Toyvo Kokkonen, Ben Konecney, Mike Kubilus. All […]
Posted inJune 7, 1999: Mining the past
The Hidden West
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Implicit in the late Wallace Stegner’s phrase, “a society to match the scenery,” is the belief that the West is built from the bottom up, and that the health and vitality of the land and its wildlife will be determined by the health and […]
Posted inMay 24, 1999: The last weird place
The feds poke a hole in the 1872 Mining Law
At 5,600 feet, Buckhorn Mountain rises above the Okanogan Highlands, its fir and larch forests extending past Washington state and into Canada. It is not truly wild since a few roads cross it and mining claims were worked long ago, but it has not been clear-cut or pocked by the kinds of mines that leave […]
Posted inMay 24, 1999: The last weird place
New twist in an old law has everyone screaming
WASHINGTON, D.C. – A good horror movie’s secret of success is not how scary the special effects or even how gory the final scene. No, it’s that totally unexpected twist just before the end, the one in which the monster turns his wrath on someone considered safe. John Leshy is a horror-flick fan. It’s one […]
Posted inMay 10, 1999: My beautiful ranchette
Beware of orange clouds
Earth-shattering explosions are a fact of life in northeast Wyoming’s Powder River Basin. Each week millions of pounds of explosives are detonated as the basin’s 17 open-pit mines rearrange thick layers of earth and extract the coal beneath. Sometimes blasting also creates clouds of nitrogen oxide gases. Luann Borgialli was alarmed in January when one […]
Posted inMay 10, 1999: My beautiful ranchette
Greens fight lonely battle near Yellowstone
The car wash in Dubois, Wyo., offers more than high-pressure soap and water – it’s got a larger-than-life fiberglass moose perched on the roof. Next door at the veterinary clinic, visitors escort sick pets through an enormous buffalo skull, and the heads of elk and bighorn sheep stare at customers from the walls of the […]
Posted inApril 26, 1999: Visionaries or dreamers?
Nuclear waste goes camping
Rocky Flats, the closed atomic bomb factory on the outskirts of Denver, is running out of room to store the waste from its cleanup efforts. By this summer, low-level transuranic waste will be stored in stainless steel containers placed in 9,600 steel drums, which will then be stored outside under temporary tents. Although the tents […]
Posted inApril 12, 1999: Is trapping doomed?
No go for a gold mine
Despite its reputation, the 1872 Mining Law may no longer be a friend of the mining industry. On March 26, the Department of Interior and the Department of Agriculture denied the plan of operations for a proposed open-pit gold mine in north-central Washington (HCN, 8/31/98), saying it failed to meet the requirements of the century-old […]
Posted inApril 12, 1999: Is trapping doomed?
Nuclear waste dump opens
Twenty-five years after it was first proposed, and a decade after its construction, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant outside Carlsbad, N.M., received its first truckload of nuclear debris. The world’s first geologically engineered nuclear waste dump opened early on March 26, right after a federal judge lifted a seven-year-old injunction that had kept the facility […]
Posted inApril 12, 1999: Is trapping doomed?
Gold mine capsizes in Westwater Canyon
Kayakers and rafters are planning celebratory boat trips down Westwater Canyon on the Colorado River this spring. As they float past the redrock walls, they can look around and see, well … othing. Their joy stems from the recent removal of mine claims situated on 960 acres in the canyon, within a wilderness study area. […]
Posted inMarch 15, 1999: Selling off the Promised Land
Deciphering the ditches
It is widely acknowledged that conventional approaches to economic development in the rural West, based on mineral extraction, industrial relocation, and capital-intensive tourism, have met with dismal results. Jobs may be created, but the benefits are inequitably distributed; growth may or may not occur, but poverty and underdevelopment persist, and in the process, the community […]
Posted inMarch 15, 1999: Selling off the Promised Land
Paying for a gold mine
When the Dakota Mining Corp. abandoned its Stibnite gold mine in the rugged mountains of the Payette National Forest last year, it left a mess behind. Shacks were stuffed with barrels brimming with unknown chemicals; it took a bomb squad from Mountain Home Air Force Base to remove one bottle of particularly volatile acid. Almost […]
Posted inMarch 15, 1999: Selling off the Promised Land
State senate says voters weren’t very smart
Were Montana voters confused last year when they passed an initiative halting any expanded or new cyanide leach gold mines? Yes, say some state legislators, and not only confused, but wrong. “Just because the people said that is what they wanted, that does not make it right,” said State Sen. Lorents Grosfield of Big Timber. […]
Posted inMarch 15, 1999: Selling off the Promised Land
The big picture
-These photos are a stop-gap look at a point in time, a chance to see what the landscape looked like six or 10 years ago.” *Bill DuBois From the pilot’s seat of his 44-year-old Cessna 180 plane, F.E. Bill DuBois has been taking photos of every precious metal mine in Nevada for 24 years. What […]
Posted inMarch 15, 1999: Selling off the Promised Land
Oil wells in my backyard?
DURANGO, Colo. – -Well, in the late 1980s, the kids started lighting the lemonade on fire, so I knew something was going on,” says Carl Weston, a resident of southwestern Colorado’s La Plata County. Something was also going on miles away at Randy Ferris’ house; he was alarmed when his tap water emerged looking like […]
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
Putting grass back
-On a quarter section in this country, no one could’ve or should’ve been expected to make a living.” * South Dakota rancher Clarence Mortenson A map of South Dakota’s Spring View Township from 1890 shows a landscape plowed and fenced off by homesteaders, lured by grandiose claims of what the plains might produce. In reality, […]
Posted inFebruary 15, 1999: Uncommon Bounty
The last mine closes in Leadville
For the past 139 years, men and machines have mined along the gulches at the source of Colorado’s Arkansas River, producing metals worth more than $2 billion at current prices. That era ended Jan. 29, when the Asarco Black Cloud Mine, which sits above timberline about 10 miles east of Leadville, Colo., hoisted its last […]
Posted inFebruary 1, 1999: Saving the Platte
Where will the waste wind up?
In December, the burial of high-level nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada was given a go-ahead by the release of a Department of Energy “viability assessment.” Project opponents, including the state of Nevada, say health and safety problems still aren’t addressed. “The assessment is a tool designed and dreamed up by the nuclear industry […]