Mother Lode Vs. Mother Nature

By JOHN SKOW/COOKE CITY

Guerrilla theater note, environmental division, bad-pun subdivision: last month Sierra Club members in Jackson, Wyoming, operating as the Not Yours, Mine, Mining Co., staked a claim to U.S. Forest Service land, now leased to the Snow King Resort and used for a ski lift. The point was to demonstrate that under archaic U.S. law, such claiming of the right to lease public land for mining is entirely legal. At press time, plans for actual mining were not firm.

The Sierra Club cutups are not the most impudent manipulators of bad U.S. mine law. New techniques for extracting bullion from low-grade ore have touched off a little-noticed gold rush in the West, devastating huge areas, often at high-altitude sites that almost inevitably pollute the headwaters of rivers. A worst example in the making, environmentalists fear, is a gold mine that Noranda Inc., a big Canadian firm operating through a subsidiary of a subsidiary called Crown Butte Mines, intends to operate in fragile Montana high country 2.5 miles from the northeast corner of Yellowstone Park and entirely surrounded by the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness.

The mining industry sees nothing outlandish in the risk Crown Butte proposes to take with the nation's oldest national park, and nothing funny about the claiming of ski runs by environmental jokers. Hard-rock mining (for gold, copper, silver and other metals) once ruled the Rocky Mountain states. The industry is foreign-dominated now (18 of the 25 largest gold mines in the country are owned by non-U.S. firms, most of them Canadian). Only one Western job in 1,000 is directly tied to metal mining. But mining interests have not lost the knack of command, nor have most Rocky Mountain legislators lost the habit of subservience. Attempts in Congress to reform the key U.S. law, passed in 1872 and not substantially revised for hard-rock mining since then, have failed so far in the Senate. A pallid bill introduced by Republican Senator Larry Craig of Idaho is industry-approved and reforms nothing.

There is real reform in a House measure offered by Representative Nick Rahall, a West Virginia Democrat. It calls for suitability reviews of hard- rock mining proposals (similar to reviews for coal-mine leases), an end to "patenting" (buying U.S. lands for an absurd $5 an acre), federal reclamation standards (now left to states) and an 8% royalty paid to the U.S. on net production. Oil, gas and coal leases on federal land require a 12.5% gross royalty, but hard-rock mining pays nothing to the U.S., and a suitability review is an airy dream. Which is why mining-industry money has watered the grass roots of pro-development "wise use" groups such as People for the West. And why David Rovig, until recently president of Crown Butte, the outfit that has Yellowstone in its sights, solicited $1,000 contributions for Rahall's 1992 election opponent. Rahall won, but there is no certainty that his mining reform, now incorporated in a bill offered by Democratic Representative Richard Lehman of California, will reach a House-Senate conference and emerge with its pants on, let alone without having its watch and wallet stolen.

One way to see how mining has scarred the land is to fly with Bruce Gordon, chief pilot of an environmental flying service called Lighthawk, and Roger Flynn, his interlocutor, who runs a one-man environmental law firm in Boulder called the Colorado Mining Action Project. From Denver the Cessna 210 heads south to New Mexico, then north along the spine of the Rockies above ulcerated | earth where the land has bled money -- from gold at Victor near Pikes Peak, and at Battle Mountain near San Luis, Colorado; and from molybdenum at Questa in northern New Mexico and at the vast Amax mine near Leadville. The hawk's-eye view shows the wreckage of mountains, dead land that will not revegetate, soured rivers, towns left to wither when mineral prices dropped and distant corporate directors cut their losses.

The rawest and most recent disaster is Summitville in the San Juan Mountains of southern Colorado. Over the plane's intercom, Flynn tells its shabby history. In all, some 280,000 ounces of gold were extracted, worth $98 million at today's price of $350 per oz. But the mine's leach pad, designed to catch sodium cyanide flushed through pulverized rock to dissolve gold, had been installed badly, in midwinter. It leaked, and the resulting solution of heavy metals in the acidic drainage poisoned 17 miles of the Alamosa River, which waters farms and ranches in the San Luis Valley. After a required bond for reclamation costs was raised from $2.2 million to $7.2 million, Galactic Resources Ltd., the mine's Canadian owner, abruptly declared bankruptcy and walked away last December. Summitville is now a Superfund site, and cleanup may run as high as $100 million.

But the Lighthawk flight continues north toward what many environmentalists fear will be a new Summitville and a new Superfund disaster. The plane threads through the grand, jagged peaks of the Wind River Range in Wyoming and on to the wild and isolated northeastern corner of Yellowstone National Park. Gordon stands the Cessna on one wing, circling a few hundred feet above Cooke City, Montana, a drowsy, ragtag little mountain burg that is a summer gateway to the park.

Just above town are a couple of 10,000-ft. peaks: Crown Butte, which is a spectacular, striated pillar, and Henderson, a hulk that bears old scars from open-pit mining. Digging petered out here in the 1950s -- as it happened, only a few feet short of the mother lode. Underneath Henderson, recent exploration has shown, are ore deposits said to be worth $1 billion. It is here that Noranda's subsidiary Crown Butte is pushing hard to start up a large 24-hour- a-day gold mine and processing mill. Workings would be underground and no cyanide would be used, but Yellowstone Park's director of resource management, Stu Coleman, has said that from an environmental point of view, Henderson Mountain is "probably the worst possible place in the U.S. for a gold mine."

It is hard to argue with Coleman. The mine threatens the environment, as well as the social and economic stability, of Yellowstone Park and nearby Wyoming. Exploratory drilling has already scared away many of the area's elk, moose, bighorn sheep and grizzly bears. The project would turn tiny Cooke City, whose winter population is about 100, into a mining town (though Crown Butte proposes the extraordinary measure of segregating its 320 construction workers and 150 miners in a mountainside work camp).

But the biggest problem here and throughout the Rockies is acidic drainage. Gold-bearing rock tends to contain large quantities of sulfur, which form sulfuric acid when exposed to air and water. The acid puts such highly toxic metals as copper and cadmium into solution, and the poisons kill aquatic life. That happened before when Henderson was mined in the '50s.

What Crown Butte proposes is to dig out 56 acres of wetlands, moose-breeding ground high on the mountain, and build a 77-acre lake to hold toxic mine residues called tailings. This mass, weighing about 5.5 million tons, would be held back by a 90-ft.-long earth-fill dam (earthquake-proof, say the company's engineers), and lined with clay and long-lasting plastic. At the end of the mine's 15-to-20-year life, the water level would be lowered and the crushed sulfate tailings would be capped with rock and dirt. The remaining water would be stagnant, not flowing. Thus the supply of oxygen would be cut off, and formation of acid would stop.

Stop for how long? The scheme has never been tested in a man-made impoundment, nor at 9,000 to 10,000 ft. in mountainous terrain subject to very heavy snowfalls, avalanches, flooding, severe underground seepage and seismic activity. If, or when, the tailings dump fails, it will funnel heavy metals into Fisher Creek, which becomes the Clarks Fork of the Yellowstone River, the only "wild and scenic" river in northwestern Wyoming. If the Army Corps of Engineers or the Environmental Protection Agency vetoes the wetlands destruction, the next best site would require a more complicated dam, and if, or when, it failed, the mess would head downstream to Yellowstone Park.

Hard-rock miners tend to think of themselves as semiheroic, crustier than cowboys, and when a site is inconvenient, they say, "You mine where the ore is." Henderson's ore is entirely surrounded by environmentalists. The Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness is not more than a mile away on all sides. Just + a bit farther, 2.5 miles to the southwest, is the great national park.

And just below Henderson are the people of Cooke City, each of them, in winter, a full 1% of the vox populi. Everyone agrees the 400 or so summer people are mostly against the mine, but summer people don't count here or anyplace else. Winter people, real Cooke City people, are split more or less down the middle. Jack Williams, a folk artist who was hurt years ago in a mine cave-in, favors Crown Butte, and so does his wife Bertie. Carpenter Jim Barrett, head of a homegrown environmental group called the Beartooth Alliance, objects to being pushed around as well as to the way the mine's advance men have explained, very politely, what they are going to do to Cooke City. Outfitter John Graham, a burly, grizzled hunting guide, says wearily that the mine's trucks and drilling rigs have ruined the area for his clients. "They've got that stuff in their backyards," he says. "They don't want to see it here."

Allan Kirk, Crown Butte's chief exploration geologist, does a good job of guiding skeptical visitors around the mine site, explaining the care with which crews have been contouring and reseeding -- "mitigating" is the word -- old mine wreckage. Orange-stained, acidic water, the beginning of Fisher Creek, flows out of an old adit (mine entrance), but Kirk says large-scale plugging with cement and waste rock will prevent such seepage from dribbling out of Henderson's far side and downstream to Yellowstone. Will this work in a watery, fractured mountain? "There are risks in all human activity," says Kirk.

Crown Butte claims to have risked about $30 million so far in exploration and environmental cleanup. What it would gain is clear; about half of the $1 billion in ore is thought to be recoverable. What the northern Rockies would gain is less certain. Yellowstone Park's fragile buffer forests would suffer more industrial invasion, if not environmental damage. Montana would get a small royalty payment, but Wyoming, which would absorb most of the social impact, would get nothing. There is no large population of unemployed miners in the area, which is getting along fairly well from tourism. Peter Aengst, an activist for the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, repeats a familiar complaint: "Crown Butte gets the mine, and Yellowstone gets the shaft."

Some such assessment may have prompted Senator Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat, to write a surprising letter to Crown Butte's management. Calling himself a friend of mining, he nevertheless said he was unwilling to gamble a national treasure -- Yellowstone -- against short-term economic gain. Damage from a failed tailings pond, warned Baucus, could be "cataclysmic" and "irreversible." He didn't say what should be done with the tailings -- truck convoys to NIMBY ("not in my backyard") land are a possibility -- but if an on-the-mountain tailings pond is necessary, mine plans "should be abandoned."

Baucus' letter, though it may stiffen the spines of the regulating agencies, probably won't be enough to stop the mine. Noranda and Crown Butte may well get a permit to operate. A draft environmental-impact statement is expected by summer, shepherded by the Forest Service and the Montana State Lands Department, two agencies generally considered to be pro-development. The fact is that the outdated 1872 mining law, which treats the U.S. as if it were an underdeveloped country to be exploited, does not allow the agencies to say no to a permit. They can say only "yes, provided . . ." and see that federal and state laws governing clean air, clean water, wetlands and endangered species are enforced. If a mine corporation is rich and determined enough, it can pay for a lot of environmental compensation. Noranda, for instance, expects to pay roughly $8 million for damage to grizzly-bear habitat at another Montana mine site.

Other expenses are not so excessive. Most of Crown Butte's land on Henderson Mountain is privately owned, but with reforms of mine law pending, the company is hurrying to patent 45 acres of federal land, about a fifth of the mine site, containing $200 million worth of ore. As mine scandals go, this one is trifling. In Nevada the Canadian-owned American Barrick Resources Corp. will probably be allowed to patent 1,793 acres, worth about $10 billion, for a nifty $8,965. Still, it is worth noting that under the 1872 law, Crown Butte will buy its 45 acres from U.S. taxpayers and own it for the remainder of eternity for exactly $225.

With reporting by Patrick Dawson/Billings