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.


From Clark's isolated hamlet of Kilgore, Wyoming's Teton Range dominates the eastern horizon and the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.

The Kilgore Project area is grizzly bear habitat.

The Centennial Mountains to the north, along the Continental Divide Trail, form the county and state's boundary with Montana.

To the south lies the Snake River Plain, where vast desert farmlands producing Idaho's most valuable crop -- spuds -- are irrigated by the Snake River Plain Aquifer, a vital fresh-water resource that is replenished in part by waters from the Centennials.

Otis Gold's exploration activities focus on Idaho, where the Kilgore Project is the "flagship" of four projects. Much of Otis Gold's pitch to prospective investors cites the United States' 1872 General Mining Act, a Reconstruction-era federal law that denies the American people royalties for minerals that even foreign companies extract from America's public lands.

This summer, on the southern slope of the Centennials, Otis Gold will begin closing public roads, bulldozing "temporary" new ones, upgrading others and dozing dozens of drill sites, all for the exploratory phase of its multi-year Kilgore Project. The results, Otis hopes, will show promise for the 12,000-acre-plus open-pit gold mine it is pitching to investors.

The Idaho Conservation League and the Greater Yellowstone Coalition recognize this as a bad deal. Let Caribou-Targhee National Forest's Dubois Ranger District know what you think: (208) 374-5422.