MONTANA A scenic vista to grow out of abandoned mine

Authorities say tens of thousands of mines are on public and private lands.
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
MISSOULA COUNTY, Mont. -- Shovel in hand, Joe Moore walked across the straw he had tamped down to help the freshly seeded dirt take hold on the hillside, then paused to look down at Cramer Creek as it wound past his home.
On a recent Thursday morning, the fog still hung low and the sun was just beginning to hit the west side of the hill as Moore and a crew of several other men were finishing what is expected to be a whale of a front yard next spring.
For the past several months, big trucks, earthmovers and workers have been restoring this stream 30 miles east of Missoula in the hope of returning it to the pristine state it was in before miners blasted a hole in the side of the mountain more than a half-century ago and tumbled down thousands of cubic yards of rocks and heavy metals.
"It's good. It's all good," Moore said, shaking dirt off his gloves and acknowledging that come spring, when the grass begins to emerge, he will be able to look out his front door at a brand-new vista.
If all goes as planned, what had been a huge waste pile will be a lush meadow divided by a burbling stream that is home to cutthroat trout.
It's really not Moore's land, but belongs instead to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, which has overseen the $1.9 million reclamation project designed to clear out waste rock larded with lead and zinc and fill a huge cavern left behind by operations at the Blacktail mine.
Reclamation project
The removal of 80,000 cubic yards of waste rock from the mine and reconfiguration of the stream was one of the many mine reclamation projects that take place each year across the country under the federal Abandoned Mine Lands program.
Authorities estimate there are tens of thousands of abandoned mines on public and private lands in the United States. Trout Unlimited, a conservation group, has reported more than 500,000 such mines in the Western states alone. There are also thousands of abandoned coal mines across the eastern and midwestern parts of the country.
The hazards range from toxic metals leaching into groundwater to dangerous gases in mine shafts to safety hazards for hikers.
Originally staked as the Blacktail mine in 1946, the Hecla Mining Co. began developing it in 1947 after a lode of high-quality lead was discovered. Hecla left in 1949 and Thomas Linton of Missoula took over, renaming the mine after himself and building a mill on Cramer Creek.
"As best as we can figure, they somehow sluiced it or shoved it down the side of the mountain to the mill," said Dave Williams, a geologist in the Bureau of Land Management office in Butte, Mont.
By the time the mine closed in 1953 because of a drop in the price of lead, about 65 tons of ore had been blasted and drilled out and run through the mill next to Cramer Creek. The value of the ore was estimated to be less than $600,000.
Nature happened
Over the years, sand size particles of lead and zinc leached into the creek as it carved a new bed around the waste rock left behind by the milling operation. During high water the lead and zinc were carried onto about seven acres on both sides of the stream, nearly reaching Moore's front yard.
The reclamation project, Williams said, is designed to remove any risk to humans and wildlife and to restore the creek.
This summer, bulldozers and other heavy equipment began digging up a 1,900-foot stretch of the stream to remove the waste rock. Half of the rock was trucked 900 feet up the side of the mountain and dumped into the abandoned mine -- a space about 100 feet wide and 300 feet deep -- until it was filled to the brim.
The remaining rock was hauled six miles up into the higher reaches of the valley, where it was dumped into a 4.5-acre "high and dry and safe" hole that had been dug in the woods, Williams said.
The soil from the hole was mixed with compost and trucked back down, where it was spread on both sides of the stream bed. After the hole was filled with the remaining 40,000 cubic yards of waste rock, a layer of soil was graded over the top and then was seeded with native grasses.
What's expected
"Next spring, this will be a real pretty meadow," said Marty Bennett, the project engineer. "The natural things will come back. We are taking something and making it better."
As Williams walked along the stream, he pointed to a spring that bubbled from the ground and trickled into the creek.
"This is a spring-fed creek," he said. "It was pretty sterile here before."
Bennett added, "The cottonwoods will come back. It should shine up and become a naturally functioning stream."
A native of Memphis, Moore moved to Montana 30 years ago and primarily has worked construction jobs. After heading to Alaska for work for a few years in the late 1980s, he returned in 1995 to settle in his two-story home overlooking the narrow creek, where cutthroat trout have been spotted in the weeks since the final loads of waste rock were removed.
The past few months have been "the best summer I've had in Montana in 25 years," said Moore, who took a job with the reclamation contractor when crews began the project. "I worked right here and saved a ton of money in gas."
Although not much of a fisherman, Moore recognizes that the presence of trout is a sign that environmental healing has begun.