Groups urge rejection of cyanide-leach mine, citing threat to public, endangered species

MCCALL, Idaho — A Canadian gold-mining company's planned open-pit cyanide-leach gold mine in Idaho's Salmon River Mountains would threaten public health and clean water, harm endangered species, violate indigenous treaty rights, and permanently scar thousands of acres of public land in the headwaters of the South Fork Salmon River, according to a coalition of local and national conservation groups.

In more than 300-pages of comments submitted Jan. 9, 2023 to the U.S. Forest Service, the groups urged the Forest Service to reject a Canadian corporation's proposed Stibnite Gold Project (SGP).

The proposal is to resume mining activities in the Stibnite Mining District on the Payette National Forest.

Groups challenging the proposed mine said officials should instead accelerate clean-up efforts at the site, which is an eligible Superfund site, polluted from decades of cyanide leach gold mining and milling.

"Cyanide-leach gold mines have an abysmal track record for water pollution, and Stibnite appears to be no different,” said Bonnie Gestring, Northwest program director at the Montana-based conservation group Earthworks.

“Despite the company’s promises for restoration, the environmental review predicts that the mine plan will leave a pit lake polluted by arsenic and mercury.”

The estimated life of the mine is 20-25 years.

Cyanide leach mining: What is it? Why so dangerous? And why you pay the bill.

BISHOP, California — To spread awareness of the threat that taxpayer-subsidized, cyanide-based gold mining poses to our use of public lands and waters, the Owens Valley-based Friends of the Inyo provides an instructive presentation on YouTube that explains cyanide leach mining.

The presenter of "The Dirty Truth About Modern Cyanide Gold Mining," Bonnie Gestring, is Northwest program director at Earthworks, a Montana conservation organization. The devastating consequences and costs born by Montana taxpayers compelled voters there to ban new cyanide leach mines in 1998.

We're sharing Gestring's talk because eastern California's rural Owens Valley and Inyo Range face the same threat as Idaho's Centennial Mountains, in rural Clark County.

As Gestring explains, industrial-scale cyanide leach gold mining operations, like those now devastating and closing off landscapes in Nevada, are an existential threat to the American public's access to and use of Western public lands.