No mines on land near Yellowstone

A conservation group said Monday it has an agreement to protect nearly 1,500 acres of private mining claims northeast of Yellowstone National Park.

The plan calls for the Trust for Public Land to use $8 million in federal money to buy the claims and convey them to the U.S. Forest Service, ending the fight over the proposed New World Mine near Cooke City.

“We’re hoping in the next several months . . . that we will be able to work with Congress and our partners, the Forest Service, to do everything that we can to make sure our funding request is made good on,” said Alex Diekmann of the Trust for Public Land.

In 1989, Crown Butte Mines, a subsidiary of Canadian mining company Noranda Inc., proposed a large gold mine near Yellowstone. Conservation groups warned it would harm the park’s ecosystem, and lawsuits were threatened.

In 1996, Crown Butte agreed to abandon its planned mine and create a fund to clean up past mining operations in exchange for $65 million in federal land and other assets. However, Margaret Reeb, who owned most of the claims Crown Butte planned to mine, wasn’t part of the negotiations and did not want to sell, the Trust for Public Land said. She eventually agreed not to mine the land and owned it until her death in 2005.

Mike and Randy Holland, her nephews, recently reached the agreement giving the Trust for Public Land the right to purchase the land and mining claims over a two-year period and to convey them to the United States for inclusion in the Gallatin and Custer national forests.

“My brother and I love that land just as much as Margaret did, and we don’t want to see its raw beauty tarnished,” Mike Holland said in a news release.

Diekmann said the conservation group had a binding agreement to buy the mining claims over two years.

“This is an example of the best kind of Montana compromise: Land owners’ rights are respected, and we get to preserve some of the most beautiful hunting, fishing and hiking land on Earth,” Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) said in a news release.