Battle Line Drawn in the Sands Over Mining Near Yellowstone : Opponents fight plans to extract gold and silver. Company says the project will pose no risk to the surroundings.

The response from environmentalists was swift and blunt when a Canadian mining conglomerate announced plans to dig $800 million worth of gold and silver out of a mountain within shouting distance of Yellowstone National Park’s northeast boundary: Not there, not under any circumstances, not ever.

Now, a line has been drawn in the alluvial sands of this tiny community in the Beartooth Mountains. The showdown will determine whether Noranda Minerals can mine one of the richest gold strikes in North America, just two miles from Yellowstone.

“It’s the mine from hell,” said Bob Ekey, spokesman for the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, a 4,500-member group formed 10 years ago to protect the national park from encroaching development.

Not so, argues the company, which is trying hard to prove that its proposed large scale, underground mine will be extraordinarily sensitive to the environment.

Noranda has already started voluntary programs to re-vegetate forests, re-contour mountain slopes and treat streams destroyed by gold miners here in years past.

“Our mine poses absolutely no risk to Yellowstone National Park,” said Mark Whitehead, spokesman for Noranda’s local subsidiary, Crown Butte Resources.

“Moreover, we intend to demonstrate how a mine can come in and--not at the expense of taxpayers--actually improve environmental conditions.”

Both factions agree that there is more at stake than a wealth of precious metals within Henderson Mountain, or the potential environmental damage.

Opponents are using the controversy to influence Congress as it wrestles with reforms of a 120-year-old federal law that says mining is the highest use of federal lands.

Under the 1872 Mining Law, which was passed by Congress the same year Yellowstone was named the world’s first national park, companies are allowed to profit from minerals extracted on public lands without paying royalties to the U.S. Treasury. The law requires no reclamation of open pits, roads or tailings impoundments.

In a broader context, the dispute here is at the crux of a heated national debate over how to strike a new balance between state and federal government control over dwindling natural resources, and the right of property owners to maximize the value of their holdings.

In a recent speech to a gathering of environmental attorneys in Boulder, Colo., Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez), chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, asserted that the Yellowstone ecosystem, “is a tremendous economic engine, but if we log and mine all the lands around it, it won’t operate--and people want that ecosystem maintained.”

For environmentalists who cite mine explosions, fish kills and cyanide leaks across the United States, Noranda’s proposal is only a reminder of the carnage that could befall the Yellowstone region, as well as this isolated community of 150 people and its tourism-based economy.

It will take two years to complete an environmental impact statement on the New World project, which is sandwiched between Yellowstone Park and the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness.

The company plans to use a mechanical milling process rather than leaching the precious metal out with cyanide.

But mine critics fear the potential impacts include degradation of local air and water quality, disturbance of prime grizzly bear habitat, and increased noise, light, traffic and littering in Yellowstone Park.

The region already is seriously polluted from past mining.

Critics particularly oppose the company’s plan to bury 5.5 millions tons of acid-bearing mine tailings in a nearby valley.

They contend the material could threaten the wild and scenic Clark’s Fork River in Wyoming.

Company geologists say the 72-acre tailings impoundment would be state-of-the-art, covered with artificial wetlands, fenced and built to withstand 500-year floods and major earthquakes--all in an area declared suitable for mining by the Jimmy Carter Administration in 1978.

“The company is spending a lot more money on this project than they are required . . . and they are doing a good job of reclamation,” said Kay Budger, spokeswoman for the local U.S. Forest Service office in charge of monitoring the mine, which would straddle private and public lands in Gallatin National Forest. “What is disheartening is opponents calling the area pristine. It isn’t. It’s been mined before.”

But Jim Barrett, 43, spokesman for a local group formed to stop the mine called Beartooth Alliance, said it is equally disheartening that the National Park Service has no say over the project he claims “is just not worth the risk.”

“You can see what miners did in the past here just scratching around in the dirt--these guys want to eviscerate a whole mountain,” Barrett said, standing beside a sterile stream stained blood red by toxic metals and acids still leaching out of an old tailings impoundment at the edge of town.

“They got away with this stuff in the past,” he said, “but there’s nothing they can do to make it OK now.”

Mine supporter Larry Wicker, 45, owner of the Elk Horn Lodge and Miner’s Saloon in Cooke City, disagrees. He suggested that the project could help answer local prayers for year-round utilities and open roads.

“Let me show you something,” Wicker said, grabbing a flashlight off a shelf, slapping a ‘be-back-in-10-minutes’ sign on his office door and bolting out of his office into the night.

Several yards away, Wicker stopped and aimed the light at a foul-smelling pond of raw sewage perched on an embankment over Soda Butte Creek, which runs through town on its way to Yellowstone Park.

Contributing to the pond, he said, “is a business owned by one of the loudest environmentalists in town. The hypocrisy of it all is great.”

That feeling is shared by Jack Williams, 80, who moved to Cooke City 53 years ago to work for $38 a day in a now-defunct chrome mine.

“That gold mine is fine with me--open it up!” Williams said, sitting comfortably close to a wood-burning stove in his 100-year-old cabin, its living room cluttered with antique mining tools, mineral samples and maps showing that Cooke City was built on patented mining claims.

“These days, things are different, there are laws to protect everything,” Williams said.

Leaning back in his chair, he smiled wistfully and added: “Yes sir, it’d be interesting to see miners working here again.”

Stuart Coleman, director of resource management at Yellowstone National Park, shudders at the thought.

He predicts that the project would increase traffic and adversely affect wildlife in his already overburdened park.

“In my business, you fight for every bit of ground for plants and animals,” Coleman said. “It’s just too bad those mountains are so rich in minerals that it is polarizing people over how best to use them.”