Whitehall, Mont. – First, there was Bull Mountain. Through all the ages of human striving and much that came before, it sat here in southwest Montana, silently enshrouding a treasure in fine-particle gold buried deep beneath its flanks.
Then, beginning in 1982, came the hole – an open-pit gold mine called the Golden Sunlight that has scooped out 400 million tons of Bull Mountain rock. The Chrysler Building and the Washington Monument could slide down the gullet of the great pit, one atop the other, and would only just peek above the old ridgeline like a periscope.
But what happens next, as the Golden Sunlight mine approaches the end of its working life, is not so obvious or stark, though it is a question likely to echo across the West as older mines close: Should the mountain be put back together again or left an open hole for all time?
Many environmentalists say the hole should be filled, but Montana state environmental regulators are leaning toward leaving the pit open and expect to reach a decision this fall that may ultimately be reviewed by the state Supreme Court.
The mine’s owner, Placer Dome Inc., has already pledged $54 million for mine closure and cleanup beginning in 2009, when it expects that most of the gold will be gone. But the company would see its costs double if it had to backfill. It also says filling in the mine would be a bad idea because of grave risks to groundwater.
History, many people here in southwest Montana say, is the invisible mover in the debate, because either option – to fill, or not to fill – touches the deep and ragged scars that the mining industry has left behind over the past century on the state’s landscape, economy and psyche.
“Montana is full of examples where a company came in and got its money and the public is paying for the reclamation,” said Kim Wilson, a lawyer for a coalition of environmental groups that is suing the state to force backfilling. “Our basic position is that if you can’t reclaim it, you shouldn’t mine it.”
Montana’s struggle over the Golden Sunlight mine also has been compounded by legal uncertainty.
The state constitution, redrafted in the early 1970s, says that all mine lands must be “reclaimed.” The state Legislature, meanwhile, has expanded the latitude given to mine regulators.
A lawsuit filed by environmentalists hoping to force backfill of the mine is before the state Supreme Court, which has agreed to hold off on a ruling until the state, in conjunction with the federal Bureau of Land Management, reaches a decision.
Either way the case goes, the millions of tons of rock and earth that came out of Bull Mountain are still here. Environmentalists say that putting the rock back would expand possible uses of the land in a post-mining future.
But most environmentalists also agree that backfilling does not make sense in every instance.
An open-pit mine in Colorado that was filled in the late 1990s, for example, almost immediately began leaking water that had become contaminated with acids from the mine’s waste rock, which had been dumped back in.