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.

Under a 19th-century federal law passed during the post-Civil War Reconstruction era, Otis is authorized to begin exploratory road building and drilling during summer 2019.

Otis Gold and its investors hope to find substantial deposits on Caribou-Targhee National Forest -- gold that is publicly owned American wealth for which Otis would not have to pay the American people any royalties.

Perhaps worse: Otis envisions using a cyanide-based process in a 12,500-acre open-pit mine just a few miles south of Montana, which banned that very same process because of the devastating legacy it has left for Montanans to deal with.

Let Caribou-Targhee National Forest's Dubois Ranger District, and U.S. Sen. Mike Crapo and Rep. Michael Simpson (Republicans of nearby Idaho Falls), know what you think.