Wilderness Watch is urging the Forest Service to protect the Cabinet Mountains Wilderness in northwest Montana by rejecting the latest mine proposal by HECLA Mining. Conservationists have long worked to protect this Wilderness from one of the world’s largest proposed copper and silver mines—the Rock Creek Mine. While the Rock Creek Mine is temporarily on hold, its parent company, HECLA Mining, is proposing to explore the eastern portion of the same Rock Creek-Montanore mineral deposit, which would also invade the Cabinet Mountains Wilderness.
The Cabinet Mountains Wilderness—one of the original 54 Wildernesses designated when the 1964 Wilderness Act was signed into law—is a 35-mile-long range of glaciated peaks, valleys, and clear lakes that’s home to a small population of threatened grizzly bears, as well as threatened Canada lynx and bull trout. The streams flowing through the Wilderness have some of the cleanest water in the country.
Mining is fundamentally incompatible with preserving the Cabinet Mountains Wilderness, its wildlife, and its clean water. But HECLA Mining wants to drill thousands of feet of tunnels into the Wilderness from the east. The tunnels would cross the Cabinet Mountains divide in the Wilderness, from the Libby Creek watershed into the Rock Creek and Bull River watersheds. Mine exploration tunnels like this often fill with water, impacting groundwater flow.
The Forest Service’s Libby Exploration Project Draft Environmental Assessment has failed to adequately address the mine’s potential impacts to the Cabinet Mountains Wilderness or the effects of mining exploration, paired with climate change, on wildlife and water. In fact, the EA claims zero impacts to Wilderness, despite the fact that the project would last 16 years and is an extensive proposal of rehabilitating 7,000 feet of existing tunnel and building an additional 4,200 feet of tunnel, all in the Wilderness.
Wilderness values like solitude, silence, and remoteness could be impacted by the close proximity of industrial mining activity and any associated development. Further, mine exploration waste would be stored outside the Wilderness next to Libby Creek and wastewater dumped into the creek, despite it providing critical habitat for threatened bull trout.
The proposed Rock Creek/Montanore mines have a long, complicated history, with the courts having rejected several state and federal approvals because the mines would violate multiple laws. This new draft EA is a step closer toward a huge operating mine—or series of mines—that would harm the Cabinet Mountains Wilderness.
Photo: Steve Boutcher
