Cyanide-based gold-mining scheme targets Continental Divide, Yellowstone regions

The farming and wildlife-rich area in Idaho that a foreign gold-mining company is targeting.

Dangerous gold-mine venture -- banned in Montana -- gives Idaho work to Butte firm

Foreign speculators at Canada's Otis Gold Corp. -- whose risky cyanide-based extraction process is banned in Montana -- have employed a Montana firm in their scheme to extract royalty-free gold from public lands in Idaho.

Drilling rig in Kilgore Project area.

In its push to launch its dangerous 12,000-acre cyanide-based open-pit operation at the headwaters of Idaho's lifeblood -- the Snake River Plain aquifer -- Otis is employing Alford Drilling, LLC, of Butte, Montana, to spearhead its Idaho exploratory drilling.

Alford's rigs began drilling Oct. 9 in a southerly branch of the wildlife-rich Centennial Mountains, at the northeastern headwaters of the aquifer that waters 3 million acres of Idaho farmland. 

What do 1872 and 1,866 have in common?

What they have in common is Otis Gold Corporation, the Canadian gold-mining company that plans to tear into the Idaho side of the Centennial Mountains, in Clark County.

A Kilgore Project access road in Clark County, Idaho.

As for those numbers ... 1872 is the date of the U.S. General Mining Act. This obsolete, Reconstruction-era law -- cherished by mining companies who are plundering Western public lands under the free-for-all declared by Donald Trump -- continues to govern the giveaway of American minerals, even to foreign mining companies like Otis Gold. And it does so without requiring royalty payments to the American treasury.

The second number -- 1,866 -- is the number of mining claims that Otis Gold has acquired in Clark County for its flagship project, the Kilgore Project. The project is named for a nearby village that is a gateway to the Centennial Mountains in Clark County, which the U.S. Department of Labor reports has virtually no unemployment.

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.

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.