Gold Mine Stirs Debate Over Environment and a Way of Life

Maria Valdez glances up toward the artificial lights illuminating a bustling gold mine carved into the mountainside where her family has hunted pinons for generations.

“That’s where the devil lives,” she tells her children.

To Valdez and her neighbors in the breathtakingly beautiful San Luis Valley, Battle Mountain Gold Co.’s mine is an unwanted intruder intent on destroying the things they hold most dear--land and water.

To BMG officials, their newly opened San Luis mine is a high-tech, environmentally sound cyanide vat-leaching operation that has given a much-needed boost to the economy in the traditionally poor valley.

“We’re going to mine this hill right down to daylight and build it back up again,” says Gary Dodson, mine operations manager.

For four years, BMG waged an uphill battle to win permits and water rights for its operation, which is projected to last seven years. Residents fought the mine, fearing that its use of cyanide would harm their water supply and that the operation would scar their beloved land beyond repair.

The two groups found themselves at odds during town meetings and in a courtroom. But the residents lost; BMG satisfied state officials that the operation would be safe.

Last spring, BMG opened the $54-million mine and carbon-in-leach mill, and produced its first gold bar in May.

The scenario faced by BMG is growing more common in the mining industry as environmental awareness takes hold across the country.

Many people do not want mines in their back yard; like San Luis residents, they are concerned about water contamination, wildlife and environmental damage.

But in San Luis, the issues run much deeper, to ethical beliefs handed down through the generations and to questions of how best to use non-renewable resources.

“If we had the technology to basically go through the entire Sangre de Cristo mountain range and pick out every speck of gold, every microscopic speck of gold that’s there, should we do it?” asked Chris Canaly, a spokeswoman for Citizens for San Luis Valley Water, an environmental advocacy organization.

“It’s just getting to the point where our resources are getting so limited we just can’t keep abusing on that level anymore.”

Flanked by two jagged mountain ranges, the high-plains, arid San Luis Valley was settled as part of Mexico’s land-grant program in the 1800s. The town of San Luis became the first white settlement in Colorado in 1851.

Today, a black-ribboned, two-lane highway runs through the town, and motorized transportation has replaced horses. But the town’s 800 residents cling to the values of their ancestors: Land, water and culture are their most treasured assets.

Every year, a priest from the local Roman Catholic church leads the community in a blessing for San Isidro, the patron saint of farmers.

“My kids know how to irrigate; they know how to garden. They ride the tractor with their grandpa,” Valdez said. “I don’t, as a parent, need to sit down and explain farming. You teach them by living.”

San Luis is in one of the poorest sections of Colorado, but the valley is anything but impoverished, contends Devon Pena, a Colorado College instructor who writes a column for the Valley Courier in nearby Alamosa.

“People characterize this community as poor all the time,” said Pena. “Well, maybe in terms of money it’s poor. But that’s sort of not really poverty.

“Real poverty is deprivation, when you’re deprived of land, when you’re deprived of healthy air.”

The valley’s farmers and ranchers have lived side by side with miners off and on for the past 40 years. But none of the operations has raised as much debate as the BMG project.

In 1987, the Houston-based BMG began prospecting for potential ore reserves. It found a suitable reserve on a hillside of an 8,000-foot mountain about five miles northeast of San Luis, where the first mining claim was established in the 1800s.

The company waded into feasibility studies as residents began to voice concern.

“They didn’t know us. We didn’t have any credibility,” recalled Dodson. “They have their own culture. They’re not used to outsiders doing things.”

BMG employs 94 workers at the 24-hour operation. Ore is mined from two open pits and topsoil and other discarded debris is stacked nearby. Gold is extracted from the ore. Cyanide leaches the gold and a carbon-type material from the ore. The mixture goes into a vat, where the electrowinnowing process is employed to separate the carbon from the gold.

Tailings are pumped to a 200-acre impoundment area covered with a low-density polyethylene liner topped by a 12-inch compacted silt bedding. Water seeping through the liner drips into a draining system that pumps it back to the mine for reuse.

Dodson said workers have to move 76 tons of rock to get one ounce of gold, which is worth about $350. There are about 425,000 ounces of recoverable gold in the ore deposit, with the life of the mine projected at just over seven years, he said.

Under a state-approved reclamation plan, BMG will remove its equipment and buildings and use the stockpiled topsoil to bury the pits and smooth over other areas when the ore deposit is depleted. Then workers will replant the area with native grasses and shrubs.

Dodson, who has mined for more than 20 years, is proud of the industry’s efforts to take better care of the land.

“As we grow and mature and become more aware, we want to save it for our children,” he said. “We don’t want to just rape it and run.”

The bustling BMG mine, digging deeper into the land every day, still leaves residents uneasy, wondering if their children and grandchildren will be able to hunt pinon nuts on the mountain as their ancestors did.

“I think there’s a lot of mistrust for anything that they propose, any kind of safeguard,” Valdez said. “When you have roots, it’s just hard to really trust anything.”