Moving Mountains
IN WESTERN MONTANA NEAR THE CLARK FORK RIVER, an old logging road goes from bad to barely there. It shoots like a slalom course through 20-foot-tall cedars. Up here the forest is thick and the trail perilously steep, and buried somewhere in the undergrowth is the entry point for the most controversial mining project in the United States.
But Doug Ward, a vice president of the Revett Silver Company, can't find his way. Maps confirm that this trail in the Kootenai National Forest is near where Revett wants to dig one of the nation's largest silver mines, but Ward doesn't see the markers. His company's plan is to tunnel from the national forest to the federally protected Cabinet Mountain Wilderness Area a mile away. Once under the wilderness area, Revett aims to spend 30 years hollowing out an untouched patch of mountain, and extracting its riches. The proposed Rock Creek Mine is a big, brash idea that could yield up to a hundred million ounces of silver and a billion pounds of copper, worth $600 million and $900 million respectively in today's markets. In many circles, the idea is an unpopular one. Nobody has ever been allowed to build a mine under a national wilderness area.
"Once we've got our trucks up here, the environmentalists are gonna come unglued," Ward said. For the past 16 years, environmentalists have joined forces to slow the charge of trucks up the mountain. One group worried about the mine's effect on endangered grizzly bears and native Bull Trout, another championed the pristine waters of nearby Lake Pend Oreille and the Clark Fork River that runs to it, and others argued for keeping the public land untouched. Last spring, this web of resistance got help from an unexpected quarter when the jeweler Tiffany & Co. placed a full-page ad in The Washington Post, lambasting the U. S. Forest Service for greenlighting the $200 million project.
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Moving Mountains
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