Targeting Idaho public lands, Canadians see lucrative future in America's gold giveaway

"There's multiple other targets out at Kilgore that have never been drilled before ... So not only do we have the existing deposit, there is a significant amount of blue sky out at the project." Craig T. Lindsay, president and CEO of Canada's Otis Gold Corp.

Blue sky over Kilgore and the Centennials

Blue sky, indeed.

Vancouver, Canada's Otis Gold Corp. says it sees a long-term opportunity to enrich its investors at Americans' expense by mining royalty-free gold from public lands in Idaho.

Otis Gold's so-called Kilgore Project is the "flagship" project of its Idaho ventures. It is named for a nearby hamlet in sparsely populated Clark County, on the southern flank of the Centennial Mountains. (Another is the Oakley Project, in Cassia County, on the Utah/Nevada border.) A five-year exploratory project is scheduled to begin near tiny Kilgore in July 2019.
 
Encouraged that the company's risky cyanide-based extraction process could produce more than 800,000 ounces of gold in Caribou-Targhee National Forest -- without having to pay royalties to the U.S. Treasury -- the Canadians say that 2019 is just the beginning.

Something far larger is coming to Kilgore, it says.

Canadian mining company hopes 'frontier' county in Idaho can deliver its golden future

The commonly accepted population density for a United States county to qualify as a "frontier" is six residents per square mile. Idaho's Clark County -- larger than the state of Rhode Island -- has 0.6 residents per square mile. It lies at the base of the Centennial Mountains.

So it is here -- in a frontier county with just 360 or so registered voters, and where unemployment is barely above 0 percent -- that a Canadian company hopes to sell investors on a dangerous open-pit gold-mining operation on wildlife-rich, American public lands.

Teton Range, viewed from Kilgore, Idaho

It would be developed just a few miles south of Montana, which decades ago banned the water-intensive, cyanide-based process that Canada's Otis Gold Corp. hopes to use in its flagship operation, the Kilgore Project.

Politically powerless, sparsely populated county is focus of risky gold-mining process

With just 900 residents, many of them immigrants and their families working in agriculture, Clark County is Idaho's least-populated county. Yet it is larger than the state of Rhode Island. It lies just west of Yellowstone National Park, in a watershed where fresh water feeds into the lifeblood of Idaho -- the Snake River Plain Aquifer. Clark also occupies the southern flank of the Continental Divide's Centennial Mountains, a prime migration corridor for wildlife in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.

Kilgore, Idaho, the Kilgore Project's namesake.

But with a tiny, isolated and politically voiceless population, limited communications and no effective news media serving as a watchdog, Clark has become a prime target for Canada's Otis Gold Corp., and its ambitions for a massive open-pit gold mine on public land.

It's called the Kilgore Project.