Banned by Montana, cyanide mining bid focuses on Idaho side of wildlife corridor

"Although cyanide reacts readily in the environment and degrades or forms complexes and salts of varying stabilities, it is toxic to many living organisms at very low concentrations. ... Fish and aquatic invertebrates are particularly sensitive to cyanide exposure." International Cyanide Management Code For the Gold Mining Industry


Montana's Red Rock Lakes National Wildlife Refuge lies just below the north slope of the Centennial Mountains, a range of the northern Rockies along the Continental Divide and the Montana-Idaho state line.

Red Rock River and the Centennial Mountains, Montana

We don't think it's a good neighborhood for a massive cyanide-based gold mine. But a foreign gold-mining company does.

More than 51,000 acres of the refuge are the direct responsibility of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, which also manages conservation easements totaling another 23,800 acres.

Many consider this to be the most beautiful of America's national wildlife refuges. Snow melt from the Centennials helps water its lakes, wetlands, meadows and woodlands, as well as the Red Rock River.

The refuge provides habitat for a complex array of wildlife species for which the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is home: trumpeter swans, sandhill cranes, raptors, moose, bears, wolves, and such native fish as Arctic grayling and west slope cutthroat trout ... to name a few.

In 1998, Montanans voted to ban new cyanide-based open-pit mines due their abysmal environmental legacy, and the state's failure to effectively regulate them. Just a few miles to the south, Idaho allows them.

So it is on the Idaho side of the Divide, a mere seven miles or so south of Red Rocks refuge and 50 miles west of Yellowstone, that the Canadian company Otis Gold Corp. (otisgold.com) is hoping to launch the Kilgore Project. If successful after its multi-year exploratory phase, the company envisions opening a 12,000-acre cyanide heap-leach open-pit gold operation about five miles northwest of the hamlet of Kilgore, and about seven miles south of the Montana state line.

The U.S. Forest Service has authorized Otis Gold to begin exploratory road-building and drilling despite the migratory habits of Yellowstone-region wildlife. Otis anticipates extracting at least 825,000 ounces of gold, currently worth about $1,225 per ounce.

In their pitch to investors, the Canadians note that Otis will not have to pay royalties to the American people for the gold it extracts. That is because the lode lies beneath federally managed Caribou-Targhee National Forest.

Under a law passed by Congress in 1872, even heavily mechanized mining operations that employ few local workers on American public lands do not owe royalties to the American people.

Idaho's congressional delegation and Legislature have historically supported that policy, and dangerous cyanide heap-leach mines that are banned in Montana. Perhaps thinking Idaho it's still 1872 in Idaho, they are willing to risk the likelihood of an environmental catastrophe, and are happy to give away America's wealth to foreigners.

We disagree.