Montana’s Mother Lode Spurs Hopes, Worries : Environment: New mine would offer $40,000-a-year jobs but further threaten the fragile Blackfoot River.

Joe Youderian makes $5.25 an hour frying hamburgers for tourists driving the mountain highway over the Continental Divide. He is 49, and he wants a double-digit wage before he retires.

In Lincoln, the Seven Up Pete Joint Venture and its proposed gold mine are his best bet, he says.

“I would probably put my application in to be a miner, a millwright, whatever,” said Youderian. “Looking at the economy around here, (a mine) would definitely be a benefit. And as far as I can see, they’re mitigating, as much as possible, any harm to the environment.”

Down the road, Mark Gerlach leans over a map and stabs at the spot of the new gold rush. The site lies about 10 miles east of Gerlach’s place--too far to see, but still part of the land he’s called home for the last 18 years. Talk of mining worries him.

“There is no monetary value on this place as far as I’m concerned,” said Gerlach, a ranch manager who also builds log homes. “I moved here and live here because I like it the way it is. There’s nothing any of those companies can do that would improve my quality of life.”

Jobs on the one hand, lifestyle on the other. In Lincoln, the conflict is clear as Phelps Dodge Mining Co. of Phoenix and Canyon Resources Inc. of Golden, Colo., the two Seven Up Pete partners, evaluate a gold deposit estimated at 6 million ounces.

If the gold is mined, the operators would probably use cyanide heap-leaching. Rock would be heaped in piles and doused with a cyanide solution that would pull out particles of gold. The gold would be separated from the cyanide, and the cyanide reused.

The mine would bring jobs paying $30,000 to $40,000 a year to Lincoln, an unincorporated mountain community of perhaps 1,000 people that is embraced by ponderosa pines and nudges the Lincoln-Scapegoat Wilderness.

Not too many years ago, the timber industry was a major employer. But the lumber mills closed in the 1970s, taking dozens of jobs with them.

Now, logging is sporadic; the leading employers are the public schools, the U.S. Forest Service and the Hi Country Beef Jerky plant.

So to many people here, a mine looks pretty good.

On the edge of the exploration site, however, flows the Blackfoot River.

It was a legendary stream once, the home of flashing cutthroat trout and a mecca for the fishermen who pursued them. It was the focus of the book “A River Runs Through It,” by Norman Maclean.

But last year, when Robert Redford shot a feature film in Montana based on the book, he did not come to Lincoln or the Blackfoot. He used the Yellowstone River, 150 miles away, to illustrate how the Blackfoot used to be.

Mining pollution holds a particularly bitter legacy. In 1975, the decades-old tailings dam for the Mikehorse Mine broke, sending tons of heavy metals into the Blackfoot’s headwaters. Seventeen years later, the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks still is unsure if any trout live in the Blackfoot for 10 miles or so above Lincoln.

“There might be a few,” said Dennis Workman, regional fisheries manager at the department’s Missoula office. “It would be pretty sparse.”

In April, the environmental group American Rivers put the Blackfoot on a list of North America’s 10 most endangered rivers. The Blackfoot may not survive another encounter with American industry, the group said.

The Montana Department of State Lands has issued a draft report, finding that there would be no significant environmental impact from expanded exploration. M. Stephen Enders, the joint venture’s project manager in Lincoln, said the future of the river is a top priority as mining is evaluated.

“Our philosophy is to design a mine that would protect the ground and surface water resources in the Blackfoot Valley,” Enders said. “I’m not sure what’s going to be required to do that at this stage of the project. It’s just too early to tell.”

But he said the effort to do things right is under way.

Drill-hole additives are used within margins of safety. Solutions aren’t discharged into surface waters. And expensive reclamation efforts began practically as crews started exploring.

“We’ve found that it’s easier to reclaim as you go than to let it all pile up to the end,” he said.

The partners have cultivated an image of candor in Lincoln, buttressed by their disclosure of more exploration information than the law requires.

But environmentalists remain guarded; too many mining companies in Montana have expressed good intentions, then failed to follow through.

“Montana history shows that where you have large mines near water, you generally end up with water quality problems,” said Murray Carpenter of the Clark Fork-Pend Oreille Coalition. “We think the river needs a break.”

Others in Lincoln say it’s the town that deserves the break.

“This place needs something,” said Gerrit Nicolai, owner of Lambkin’s of Lincoln Bar and a board member for the Blackfoot Valley Economic Development Corp.

“If we go back a few years, there was a minimum of five logging mills up here,” he said. “Now, there are none.”

But Gerlach worries that if those plans are drawn, decisions on what quality of life is acceptable “will be made in Phoenix by attorneys and bean counters whose quality of life is measured by living in Phoenix.”

For him, that’s not a good standard. He can sign for his groceries at the local store, and has no desire to see a big chain operation take its place.

But even Gerlach acknowledges that the town could do worse than the Seven Up Pete partners.

“These guys are professional,” he said. “If it’s going to be done, I’d prefer that Phelps Dodge do it.

“But mostly, I just wish they’d all go home.”