Mining Trouble
Powder Magazine
East of Mammoth Hot Springs the road across Yellowstone National Park climbs to the snowy Blacktail Deer Plateau. Three of us, crammed in a Jeep Cherokee with our skis, boots, and backpacks, drive deeper into winter with each passing mile. There are no other cars, but we encounter plenty of elk and buffalo, which surprise us by suddenly appearing around blind corners. We make frequent stops --the animals are in charge here; no one contradicts them.
It takes time to get across Yellowstone in winter. The place is big and empty, and a metal gray sky is spitting snow at us. In the Lamar Valley , not far from where the Park Service is holding timber wolves prior to re-introducing them into the wild, a large gray coyote hunts gophers near a buffalo herd. The bison sweep the snow aside with their shaggy heads, revealing the meadow grass below. Not far away, an old winter-killed bull lays mostly eaten, ribs showing through his tattered brown hide. A couple of magpies and a fox peck away at the gristle.
The road ends just outside the park at a collection of snowbound cabins called Cooke City , Montana . A hundred or so year-round residents live here in this town cradled between the soaring peaks of the Absaroka and Beartooth mountains --guides, outfitters, shop keepers, and others who just like their space. It's a fair bet nobody settles in Cooke by accident. Just to get to a grocery store involves a trip across the park and down the Paradise Valley to Livingston , Montana --a roughly six hour round trip. To live in Cooke you have to love the mountains, love the solitude, and want to keep the world at a distance.
We crunch the jeep into a snowbank in front of a small wooden building with a sign proclaiming: "This Business Supported by Tourism and Recreation." Inside is the man we're looking for, Bill Blackford, a thirtyish transplant from Florida with thinning hair who loves to sit around the shop sipping cappuccino, talking the ears off anyone who'll listen.
Bill and his wife Tami, an animated young woman with a contagious laugh, moved here five years ago after several stops in various Montana towns because Cooke was "exactly what we were looking for --a tiny mountain community surrounded by wilderness, a place where we could ski, ride, or hike every day," says Bill. The next step was to figure out how to make a living in paradise. Looking around for an opportunity, Bill and Tami saw that the economy in the greater Yellowstone area was shifting from the traditional mainstays of resource development to tourism and recreation, so they turned their passion for wilderness into jobs. The Blackfords opened a ski and mountain bike shop catering to the backcountry travelers who flock here and, says Bill "so far it's working out. We're the store at the end of the road, the place you can find whatever you forgot or didn't know you needed."
Bill and Tami have also responded to the growing numbers of backcountry skiers who are discovering the Cooke City area and its long winters. For a modest fee, the Blackfords will shuttle you and your gear up into the high country, knocking off several miles of switch-backing old mining roads in a hurry.
The only dark cloud on the horizon for Bill and Tami, who recently built a house behind the shop and plan to stay put, is the gold mine slated for development right outside town on the slopes of Henderson Mountain , a backcountry skier's Mecca in winter and mountain biker's utopia in summer.
Henderson was mined earlier in this century --the signs of those activities lie buried under several feet of snow. But the scale of what Canadian conglomerate Noranda Inc. and its subsidiary, Crown Butte Mines, propose would dwarf any prior damage. Bill and Tami fear their business will be jeopardized, and their lives disrupted, if Noranda develops what the company calls the New World Mine. It's a fear Bill and Tami have lived with every day for the last couple of years, and even before he finishes brewing our cappuccinos Bill launches into his reasons for opposing the mine.
"The economy here depends upon the natural beauty of the area," he says. "People come here because of the scenery, the wilderness. A huge new mine would change all that. Our business won't survive if they build that mine."
The next thing Bill does in his capacity as guide is lead my friends Dan, Ted, and me down the snowy main street to the saloon, where he promises we'll feel the pulse of the town. We take turns buying rounds and watch Cooke City come and go.
Bill points out a dark haired, bearded man folks call "Three Dog" who walks in carrying a basketful of puppies, which he tries to hawk to the bar patrons for $10 apiece. "Three Dog lives through the winter (and we're talking thirty below) in an old VW bus with a pack of dogs for company," says Bill.
After a while a fellow in his fifties with white Don King hair walks over and talks skiing with Bill for about half an hour. The rest of us work our way through the beer list and chow on free popcorn.
"Dude's a real character," Bill says when he moves on. "You should see him trim the ice from his roof with a machine gun. I'm not kidding."
Across the room at the bar three other folks are engrossed in conversation --the stuff of talk radio, or daytime TV. The topic is Ouija boards. Are they "the work of the devil?" And if so, do they lead to --in this order-- "Drugs, marijuana, sex, and violence?"
A little later a young guy with his arm in a cast strolls in. "Okay," says Bill, feeling a need to explain. "That guy was shot when he pounded on his friend's door. His buddy was so freaked on crack he thought whoever was knocking was a cop."
Cooke City, named after 19th century railroad tycoon Jay Cooke, Sr., is the kind of place where people drive their snowmobiles buck naked down Main Street on the Fourth of July --or right into the saloon at any time; where folks tend bar all summer to pay off their winter tabs; where some joker might say the giant wooden phallus in the saloon (over there by the jukebox) raises chainsaw art to new heights.
In the morning, flurries give way to a full-fledged snowstorm. Bill hauls us up to Henderson Mountain with his snowmobile and a homemade sled, a contraption we fondly call "the poor man's helicopter."
At the base of Henderson , below the summit of Daisy Pass near a stand of whitebark pine, is the little log cabin Alfred "Horn" Miller, a trapper and prospector, built in the 1870's. The cabin is buried under a huge mound of snow. Bill and Ted grab shovels and dig out the door, while Dan and I excavate the windows.
Bill and other local backcountry skiers belong to the Beartooth Alliance, an ad-hoc group opposed to the New World Mine. Every spring they gather on the slopes of Henderson and hold a backcountry skiers "Rendezvous" here, drawing attention to the threat while celebrating the matchless spring skiing. Skiers come from across the West to join in the festivities, and they have quite a party, acclaiming Henderson Mountain and toasting the virtues of an area that can honestly boast of its nine month winters.
These Alliance types are dead earnest about the fight to "save the Beartooths," but they don't fall for the old, false choice of "jobs versus nature." Instead, they take a positive, pro-economic growth approach to their fight. To that end these skiers and their allies have restored, and maintain, several backcountry cabins in the area to encourage tourism. The cabins are solid, with wood stoves, and are stocked with some basic supplies. By actively attracting skiers to the area and encouraging use, these anti-mine activists hope to show that keeping the land wild can be good for the local economy.
"There's no charge to use these cabins," says Bill, ushering us through the heavy door. "We just ask that people treat them well, maybe leave something useful behind, and spend some of their tourist dollars in town."
We dump our gear, crank the stove to warm the place up, and then head out into the storm. Now, we're breaking trail through some eighteen inches of new powder, and we're sweating despite the January temperature, which is in the low teens, and the wind.
In the shelter of a whitebark pine I open my pit-zips (Ted calls them "snow-scoops," because he often forgets to zip them closed before heading down-mountain) and vent. I also gulp some thin mountain air. The stuff is anemic, like the 3.2 Buckhorn beer we had to drink in Colorado when we turned eighteen. There's nothing to it. I can't seem to get enough and I keep sucking it down.
Bill is our point man, and he's cutting a zigzag trail up Henderson . Breaking out of the open pine forest we skin up a last steep pitch across a snowfield to the crest of the ridge. And there we stand for a moment with goofy grins, panting, four solitary figures in the epicenter of a snowstorm swirling through this still-beating heart of the Rocky Mountain wilderness.
We rip skins from skis. We clear goggles and snap powder skirts. We secure gauntlet gloves and, yes, we remember to batten-down the snow-scoops. Next, we survey the slopes in the monochrome light, assessing the avalanche danger. We check our beacons, pick a line, and prepare for the descent.
Bill hesitates for a moment and looks around, there's something on his mind. For a moment I'm lost in thought --there's something out there that commands attention. Though I'm standing on a mountain of gold, I'm more affected by the distance and the space and the feeling that here we're in the presence of forces untamed and powerful and not necessarily friendly. It's a feeling that's gone just about everywhere else: wildness. Between the pelting flakes, bits of implacable terrain appear through rifts in the storm --an ocean of snowcapped peaks and evergreen flanks stretching from the stinking sulphur fumaroles of Yellowstone National Park , to the sullen and hostile Absarokas where I worked as a ranch hand during high school summers, to the high, glacier-scoured Beartooth Plateau behind us.
There're grizzlies out there, I think.
And there's gold under my boots.
To the Sioux, gold was "the yellow metal that drives white men crazy." Blue coated cavalry drove these Indians from their sacred Black Hills when the stuff was found there in the 1870's. But that's the story of the human race. Jason chased the Golden Fleece. Spanish Conquistadors wandered the Americas , searching for El Dorado . Some of our most memorable acts are driven by a passion for the power of gold.
And what's the stuff worth, anyway? I mean in money (clearly, it wasn't worth a damn to the Sioux). Currently it's worth about $380 an ounce. What do we do with it? Mostly we decorate ourselves with it. About 80 percent of the gold we scrape out of the ground goes for personal adornment. The rest --about 20 percent-- we bury in steel vaults.
Here's what we do: We dig it up here so we can bury it again there.
Hardrock miners have a proverb that guides them in their digging. "Mine where the ore is," they say. But sometimes the ore is in a troublesome spot. Unfortunately for all sides in this conflict, that's the case with Henderson Mountain , in the Gallatin National Forest , just two and a half miles from Yellowstone National Park in one direction, and about two miles from the pristine Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness in another. The ore is smack-dab in the heart of the highest, wildest mountain refuge in the West. And there's not much wild left out here, in a region the New York Times calls "Endangered."
Conservationists say the Henderson Mountain area is a vital organ of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, and a mine here could be a fatal wound, kind of like a shot through the lungs. This is critical moose and grizzly habitat, they point out, and the mine site straddles three watersheds draining into the Yellowstone River , including Soda Butte Creek, which flows directly into the park, and the Clarks Fork of the Yellowstone, Wyoming 's only Wild and Scenic River .
Mine opponents say the situation couldn't be worse. "I guess if you threw a dart in a map of the United States and decided to put a gold mine there, it's probably the worst place possible --high elevation, next to Yellowstone, grizzly bear habitat, three drainages," Stuart Coleman, director of resource management for Yellowstone National Park, told the Casper, Wyoming Star-Tribune . "It's just a bad deal all the way around." Mike Finley, Yellowstone Park Superintendent, says "I'm stunned this could be taking place. How could the logical mind approve this?"
The park brass aren't alone in fearing the worst. The Times calls the proposed mine "a catastrophe." And Montana Senator Max Baucus, considered a friend of mining interests, has written to Noranda, protesting that "I cannot think of an area more sensitive than that being proposed by the New World Mine..." Baucus then draws a line in the snow, declaring "I am not willing to gamble with a national treasure for short-term economic gain."
Ironically, and clearly not foreseeing the future consequences of his actions, in 1872 President Ulysses S. Grant signed both the act creating Yellowstone National Park and the Mining Law of 1872, which declares that companies may (still) take title to and extract minerals from federal lands for just $2.50 to $5.00 an acre.
The Beartooth Alliance, Cooke City locals like Bill and Tami, and conservation-minded people throughout the country are concerned about Noranda's plans to hollow out Henderson Mountain, extract eight million tons of ore, fill a wetland the size of 70 football fields with 5.5 million tons of toxic waste rock piled 10 stories high, and then contain the poisonous sludge, (in an area the Times calls "geologically precarious" due to its altitude, severe climate, proclivity to avalanche, underground seepage, and seismic activity) with a 90 foot long earthen dam.
Despite the site problems and the fact that the containment technology has never been tried in such a setting, Noranda asserts it can prevent poisonous runoff from entering the ecosystem "for eternity."
"It's really not rocket science," Chip Todd, a project engineer working on the design for the impoundment, told the Billings Gazette . "It's basically no more than a pond structure, a water reservoir, and we're putting tailings (poisonous waste rock) in it and covering it up with water to keep it from turning acid."
"That sort of technological confidence," says a New York Times editorial "chills the blood."
Ken Pierce, a United States Geological Survey (USGS) geologist, wrote the Greater Yellowstone Coalition to assert "Crown Butte's proposition that tailings can be permanently stored along the center of a confined, steep mountain valley contradicts the well-understood process that streams erode their own valleys." In other words, the impoundment will eventually fail --the only question is when.
What conservationists really fear is a repeat of what happened a few hundred miles to the south, in a similar high-altitude setting in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado , at a place called Summitville.
At Summitville, another Canadian company (18 of the 25 largest gold mines in the U.S. are foreign owned), Galactic Resources of Vancouver, British Columbia, declared bankruptcy and left Colorado after extracting $98 million in gold. The company walked away from a seeping toxic soup of cyanide and heavy metals that has killed trout streams, polluted valuable farm water supplies, and threatens to spill into the headwaters of the Rio Grande .
"Summitville was the classic slow-motion accident, witnessed by many but stopped by no one." according to the Denver Post . "It was a scandal....A "horror story."
Today Summitville is a Superfund site, and U.S. taxpayers will spend an estimated $100 million, at the current rate of $40,000 per day, to contain a disaster that enriched foreign shareholders and contributed nothing to the U.S. Treasury.
The Mining Law of 1872 releases companies from performing environmental reviews to determine whether sites are suitable for mining, or if they might be better used for some other purpose; and the law exempts companies like Noranda and Galactic from paying royalties to the U.S. Treasury for the hundreds of millions of dollars they extract from the public lands.
Under the law, companies are also excused from reclaiming abandoned mine sites, passing that cost on to U.S. taxpayers. The federal government estimates that hardrock mining has left the U.S. with a legacy of 500,000 abandoned mines, 50 billion tons of waste, and 10,000 miles of polluted rivers and streams. Conservationists fear Henderson Mountain will be added to that grim list. Louisa Willcox, Program Director for the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, says Henderson "is a Superfund site in the making."
In August, mine opponents finally had something to cheer about when President Bill Clinton ordered a two-year moratorium on mining claims in the area after visiting the Henderson site. The Presidential order doesn't completely eliminate the chance that Henderson will eventually be developed, but it does make the task much more difficult for Noranda. The President's order prevents the company from using alternative waste-dumping sites should their original Fischer Creek impoundment be rejected by the Environmental Protection Agency or the Army Corps of Engineers.
"By withdrawing these lands," says Mike Clark, executive director of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, "President Clinton has put a noose around the mine site."
But right now, up on Henderson in a howling storm, we ponder the consequences. What if Noranda doesn't go away? What if the dump site is approved?
"The skiing here will be shot, that's for sure." says Bill, turning his attention back to the untouched snow below us. "That's too bad, because this place could sustain a healthy economy for generations if we gave it the chance. Noranda says they'll get about a dozen years out of that mine."
"The government should declare this a National Recreation Area." Bill continues, waving his ski pole in an encompassing sweep. "We've got great skiing, we've got about 120 miles of snowmobile trails, and we've got even more trails for mountain biking, not to mention the hiking, horse-packing, big game hunting, fishing..."
Dan interrupts the tirade with an:
"Ah, gentlemen..."
I plunge in. The snow is so light and pure and aerated it shoots over my shoulders as I pick up speed in the fall-line. My skis meet soft, yielding resistance when I initiate a turn, and I feel like I'm floating rhythmically through a shifting medium with no depth or dimension.
Like a rolling wave, the snowy slope is something I'm in, not on. No need to use razor-edges and absorb big G-forces while compressing through turns, instead I simply relax and almost languidly follow my frolicsome skis as they dart in and out of the snow like dolphins playing a ship's bow-wave.
Just off to my right, I see Ted's blue parka bobbing in a powder storm. We raise rollicking clouds of cold smoke rocketing down the gullies. We dodge and weave DNA strands among the whitebark pines. We hoot and holler loud enough to rouse a hibernating grizzly. We skin back up a thousand feet and do it again, and again, and again --first tracks every run, leaving contrails of snow shimmering in the frigid air behind us. We ski and ski, never depleting the riches of Henderson , and at night we return, exhausted but deeply satisfied, to the snowbound cabin with the cheery wood stove.
Days pass, and more snow falls. It covers our tracks, wipes away all trace of our presence. And then one day the sun comes out. The snow glitters and gleams in the bright light --surely the work of some celestial alchemist-- and a dazzling new world of shining mountains stands revealed against the crisp sky. It's almost too much to take, it's so beautiful.
I want it to last forever.
