Nothing
GOLD
Can Stay
Is mining in Oregon worth the costs? PART I OF II
BY CAMILLA MORTENSEN
C
ompared to other Western states like Idaho and California, “on the
whole Oregon is not very well endowed,” when it comes to gold, UO
geology professor Mark Reed says. He says even Washington has more
gold than Oregon.
But thanks to our geologic history of volcanoes and mountain
formation we do have the precious metal. And thanks to the skyrocketing
price of gold — analysts predict an ounce of gold will sell for more than
$2,000 before the end of the year — there’s a gold rush for Oregon’s
public lands. Miners from California are fl ocking to southern Oregon’s rivers, and the fi rst
commercial gold mine in the state in a very long time has been proposed in Malheur County
by a Canadian company.
Gold has been looking like a safe-haven investment these days while the stock market
fl uctuates wildly. On Sept. 6, gold went for $1,920.94 an ounce. With prices like that, it’s
no wonder that people want to buy and sell gold plucked from the broken necklaces in your
jewelry box or panned and stripped from Oregon’s pristine rivers and public lands. But gold
can be volatile, in investments or the environment.
Mining for gold, precious metals and other hardrock
minerals has a toxic legacy in the West. The mercury used
to separate gold from the rocks and minerals still poisons
streams and lingers around mining sites. Mercury mines
such as the Black Butte mine outside of Cottage Grove,
now a Superfund site, are believed to be a source of the
high mercury levels that lead to warnings about eating
some of Oregon’s fi sh. And the scars of open pit mines dot
the Western landscape from mining companies scraping
away the land and drenching the rubble with cyanide to
leach out the gold.
Modern mining companies say that this sort of
contamination is a thing of the past. Andy Gaudielle is the
project manager for a Canadian company called Calico
Resources that is proposing the Grassy Mountain gold
mine in Eastern Oregon. “Today’s mining is a lot different
than it was 100 years ago, ” Gaudielle says. “The mining
industry has had a bad rap and deservedly so,” he admits,
but Calico will use “new methods and new processes” to
process 1,000 tons of rock per day to get at the 85,000
ounces of gold a year the company believes lies beneath
Oregon’s soil. If gold stays at $2,000 an ounce, then that
comes to $170 million worth of the precious metal a year.
But conservationists and others aren’t so sure that the
damage to the environment is worth the price, or if the
gamut of permits that miners must run have any teeth in the
face of the seemingly impregnable Mining Law of 1872.
Lesley Adams of Rogue Riverkeeper says suction-dredge
mining for gold in southern Oregon is suffocating aquatic
life due to turbidity in the river, and the environment
isn’t the only cost — cleaning up toxic mine wastes costs
taxpayers billions.
Chris Hansen of the Oregon Natural Desert Association
(ONDA) says he is concerned about issues of water use,
contamination and road building at Grassy Mountain. And
everybody wants to know if the danger to the environment
and cost to taxpayers is worth the money the mining will
make for out-of-state companies.
The Environmental Protection Agency has estimated
that mining pollution affects 40 percent of Western
watersheds, and 2011 Government Accounting Offi ce
testimony identifi ed 33,000 abandoned hardrock mine sites
in the West and Alaska that degraded the environment by
contaminating surface water and groundwater or leaving
arsenic-contaminated tailings piles. According to the EPA,
the federal government spent at least $2.6 billion between
1998 and 2007 on cleaning up hardrock mines. Oregon
alone has 5,827 abandoned hardrock mines, according to
data gleaned from the Bureau of Land Management and
Forest Service.
Gold in hot water
UO professor Reed, who researches hydrothermal
geochemistry, says Oregon’s geologic history of hot
water is what brought gold to its mountains and streams.
Oregon has three kinds of gold deposits, he says: veins in
metamorphic rocks in southern Oregon’s Klamaths and in
Eastern Oregon’s Baker City area; “placer deposits” from
weathering and erosion of the metamorphic vein gold; and
“veins in young volcanic rocks, such as the early Cascade
volcanoes and other volcanic areas on the east side of the
Cascades.” Oregon may not have a lot of gold, but what
there is spreads throughout the state.
Metamorphic rocks are basically rocks that were
changed by pressure. Reed says the metamorphic gold
was “cooked out” of the submarine volcanic rocks as
they were created in an ancient subduction zone. Gold, as
well as many other metals such as copper, lead and zinc,
is transported in hot water and carried by sulphurs, Reed
says. As the hot water goes through the rock it takes gold
with it. So a vein of gold basically follows the fl ow of
ancient hot water through faults and cracks in rock.
When a vein of gold “is weathered and eroded, then
it forms grains that are eroded into streams and rivers,”
Reed says. That gold forms placer deposits, which is what
miners hunt for when they pan for gold, and what suction
dredge miners are searching for when they suck up gravel
from riverbeds.
“Molecularly, on a placer deposit, the gold isn’t tied up
with anything,” says Gary Lynch, assistant director of Min-
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