Some fear mine could drain mountain lakes

SANDPOINT – A century ago, the mountains in North Idaho and neighboring northwestern Montana were sprinkled with glory holes, mines that cleaved millions of tons of ore laden with precious metals from the ground.

Most of those mines have since played out. The new economic glory holes are what Sunset magazine last spring called “the West’s most beautiful lakes,” tourist-magnet blue-green oases nestled among the pine-carpeted peaks.

But a new $200 million copper and silver mine awaiting federal and state regulators’ approval under Montana’s Cabinet Mountains Wilderness near the Idaho border could pull the plug on some of the region’s mountain lakes, turning them into dry holes, officials fear.

“Their biggest challenge is on top of the Cabinet Mountains there are several naturally occurring lakes and there are faults that run through that mountain range,” Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer said. “Unless they can demonstrate that they are going to be able to pierce into that mountain and not allow that fault to drain those lakes, they are not going to get those permits.”

Spokane-based Revett Minerals bills the Rock Creek Mine as a new generation of environmentally benign and aesthetically pleasing mineral extraction plants. The company’s advertising slogan for the mine is: “You won’t even know we’re there.”

The project has been mired in lawsuits almost since its inception 20 years ago as the first mine beneath a federally protected wilderness area. Environmental groups have successfully overturned two of the three biological opinions in favor of the mine by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and are challenging the U.S. Forest Service’s initial approval for the mine to move forward. In 2004, Tiffany and Co. took out a full-page Washington Post newspaper ad opposing the mine, declaring the area more valuable for wildlife than for jewelry.

Revett has pledged to boost the area’s dwindling grizzly bear population by creating a 2,450-acre sanctuary and paying 35 years’ worth of salaries for a Montana state bear management specialist and a security guard to protect the bear habitat. The Fish and Wildlife Service said in October that building the mine would be better for the bears than leaving intact the 114 million ounces of silver and 935 million ounces of copper lying underground.

Revett CEO William Orchow said he was surprised that Schweitzer, who has previously expressed support for the mine proposal, would raise the lake-draining issue after the Forest Service had determined it was not a threat.

“This has been exhaustively studied,” said Orchow, whose company expects to begin exploratory digging at the site as soon as the snow melts next spring. “We are going to stay a minimum of a thousand feet away from the edge and the bottom of the lake, and it’s been determined that will be a sufficient safeguard to prevent any draining.”

A 2001 Montana Department of Environmental Quality study of Cliff and Rock lakes – two of the six Cabinet Mountain lakes above the ore body – found that tunneling into the complex fracture system of rock might create artificial hydraulic forces that could suck water from the aquifer that feeds the lakes.

The Kootenai National Forest’s environmental impact study on the proposal calls for using mined-out tunnels under the Cabinet Mountains wilderness as a 207-million gallon reservoir necessary to contain all the water that would flow into the underground passages during the mine’s 25-year operating life. That would be about a 64-acre lake 10 feet deep.

Opponents of the mine fear this new underground reservoir would come at the expense of the scenic bodies of water above.

“This mine cavity they create is going to fill with water, and that water is coming from somewhere, either the lakes above or the conduit that supplies the entire region,” said Jim Costello of the Rock Creek Alliance, a Sandpoint-based group that’s fighting the mine plan. “They have no idea when they start fracturing 1,000 feet below the surface what is going to happen.”

But Carson Rife, Revett’s vice president of operations, said mining won’t take place in buffer zones around known fault lines, reducing the chance of intersecting with major underground water conduits and emptying the lakes above.

“The water that would be coming into the mine would be groundwater, but it would be from areas well outside where there would be recharge into the lakes,” he said.

John McKay, the Rock Creek Mine project coordinator for the Forest Service, said Revett would be required to patch any water leaks in the mine with grout and the agency would monitor the blasting and drilling activity to determine whether the buffer zone is protecting the lakes.

“There’s no way you can fully understand it until you get underground,” McKay said. “But if you are going to have to have a metal mine in your backyard, this is the one I would select.”

Local support for the mine splits at the state line, with elected officials of Montana’s Lincoln County – where the jobs would be located – in favor. Neighboring Bonner County – home of the state’s largest lake, 40-mile-long Pend Orielle, 25 miles down-river from the mine – is opposed to it. The county seat of Sandpoint has passed resolutions against the mine three times since 1993.

Montana’s Schweitzer, a soil scientist before entering politics, said although he’s convinced the mine won’t hurt water quality in the region, the threat of draining the wilderness lakes could be a deal-killer when it comes to the state permitting process. “They need to get over that hurdle before they even talk to the state of Montana,” he said.