Beside the Stream

I spent the day up in Silverton touring mine remediation projects.

The mountains around Silverton were tunneled with mines starting around 1880.

There were mines everywhere–see how vibrant these rocks are?  They’re permeated with metals.  The last mine closed in 1991, and many piles of mine tailings  lie directly on or beside the creeks, acidifying the water and dumping nearly a thousand pounds of metals into the river below each day.

We tour remediation sites from about 10,500 feet to nearly 12,000 feet.  At this site, a great pile of tailings was moved off the stream; they put a french drain under it and a clay cap on top of it.

The boarding house for this mine is to the right, and there’s a 6-hole outhouse right over the creek.  It’s a cold and rainy day.

Here’s an adit–an entrance to a mine–at 11,000 feet.  This stream used to flow through a giant pile of tailings, since moved, capped, and revegetated, and it’s right next a mine that used to contribute nearly 80 pounds of zinc a day to the waterways below, the largest single source of zinc to the river. The shaft was plugged with cement a few years ago, and this year it was caulked/we talked with the engineers who were just finishing the job.

Here we’re at two remediation sites where tailings were moved off waterways, capped and revegetated, and a ditch diverting water to defunct mines across the mountain was filled in and revegetated. (This is a photo of a truck-loading site from the 1930s, though the mines are older.) It’s darned hard to revegetate up here.  There’s almost no topsoil, there’s too many minerals, and the native vegetation is a complex mixture of about 60 species of grasses and forbs.  If you use fertilizer, you encourage non-native species.  There have been about $3.5 million in volunteer labor on these projects, and that includes transplanting actual plants up to these remote, high altitude sites.

It’s the first snow for me.   Bon hiver!! Good winter to you!

Here we’re nearly at the top of the mountain, mining at 12,000 ft with the boarding house behind; the adit is to the right of the pile.  Another giant pile of tailings was moved, capped and vegetated.  The waterways had been made into a ditch, so that was recontoured.

This is the most recent mining operation, opened in 1940 (the earliest was from 1880) but you can see that these substantial industrial sites are astonishingly remote.