Mines once generated the wealth for many Colorado towns — for their people, their companies, and even their state as a whole. But this wealth came with an environmental price.

There are about half a million abandoned mines across the country, according to the Bureau of Land Management, and most are in the Western United States. More than 23,000 of them are in Colorado alone. Twelve of them have been listed as requiring immediate attention by the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund program.

The towns of Silverton, Creede and Aspen all started off as mining towns but now inherited a Superfund site.

Although Silverton made headlines in 2015 when its nearby river turned orange, putting the spotlight on the perpetual discharge of heavy metals coming from its mining sites and leading to the creation of a large Superfund site of 48 mines, Creede is planning to plug its leaking tunnel while hoping for mining to come back. As for Aspen, it is one of the very few sites in Colorado that has been “delisted” from the EPA’s National Priority List after a 10-year-long battle led by the local residents. Silverton, meanwhile, is struggling with the size of its Superfund site while looking for innovative techniques to make cleanups more effective.

Bonita Peak Mining District:

a 48-Piece Puzzle

Scott Roberts was in his office in Durango, located about two blocks from the Animas River, when his phone rang. “Hey, there’s been a mine release in the Silverton area and it’s heading down to Durango,” he was warned.

Durango is located about 50 miles downstream from Silverton, where an investigator contracted by the Environmental Protection Agency caused on August 5, 2015 a leak of the pressurized water behind the portal of the Gold King Mine, leading to the discharge of 3 million gallons of contaminated water into the Animas River.

As Roberts was wrapping his head around what had just happened, pictures of the river turning orange began to pop up. “It was coming our way,” said Roberts, who works as an aquatic ecologist for the Mountain Studies Institute, a not-for-profit research and education center.

On August 6, Roberts and his colleagues grabbed sampling and filtering equipment, bottles and nets and went down to the river to start collecting water samples. But nothing happened until about 36 hours after the incident occurred. Roberts even started to think that maybe the mine release wouldn’t reach Durango.

Roberts and his colleagues were standing on bridges with flashlights pointing at the river when suddenly, at around 10 pm, the water finally started changing color.

Scott Roberts sampling in the Animas River on August 6, 2015. Photo courtesy of the Mountain Studies Institute.

Water samples after the Gold King Mine. Photo courtesy of the Mountain Studies Insitute.

The scene was surreal for the scientists, and for the locals who woke up the next morning with their nearby river now orange.

The spill put a spotlight on a massive issue that most of the western US states are facing: the dangers posed by abandoned mines, and the difficult task of cleaning them up.

The Gold King Mine was shut down in 1922. It is one of the 400 abandoned and inactive mine sites located in the Upper Animas Watershed.

The latest operating mine closed in 1991, but these sites still discharge contaminated water that contains heavy metals such as cadmium, zinc, iron, arsenic, copper, manganese, lead, and aluminum into streams, which made the watershed unable to sustain aquatic life.

Though the sight was alarming, the Gold King Mine spill had little impact on fish near the mine — because fish there had already been killed by past pollution — and downstream the spill’s effects were diluted.

Roberts reported enormous spikes in metals during the spill. “Some of the metals were 100 to 1,000 times greater than they were before the event,” he said.

But it didn’t last. “It was like a slug of mine water that moved through in just a couple of days,” Roberts said. If it had stayed at those elevated metal concentrations for longer, Roberts thinks, there would have been a much greater impact on aquatic life. The sludge moved quickly so riverine species weren’t exposed to high levels of contaminants for more than a few days.

After the spill, federal and state officials came into town to talk about the issue. Officials from the towns of Silverton and Durango, the counties of San Juan and La Plata, from local tribes and other interested stakeholders wrote a letter to request that the site be added to the National Priority List of the Superfund program.

In September of 2016, the EPA finally added the Bonita Peak Mining District, which includes the Gold King Mine and 47 other abandoned sites, to the NPL.

The EPA had previously pushed multiple times for the creation of a Superfund site, but the community had always been reluctant to declare the mining district as such. Some residents had hoped to potentially start mining again in the area, but the Superfund designation made it much more unlikely the mines would ever open again and provide economic opportunities for the community.

“When your economy relies on visitors coming, you're worried of course that people will not come visit, because they think it's an unhealthy place,” Ty Churchwell of Trout Unlimited said. “Well, the Gold King Spill opened the door. The whole world saw it.”

Although the spill and EPA takeover of the site and cleanup happened six years ago, the issues around it haven’t been resolved, essentially due to the complexity and the size of the Superfund site.

Cement Creek in Silverton is highly contamined with heavy metals from the mines nearby.

Despite the drastic impacts of the Gold King Spill, the EPA announced last January that they plan this summer to drill into a different mine — the collapsed entrance of the Bandora Mine near Silverton — that’s also at risk of a blowout.

“If the situation sounds familiar, it is,” wrote The Durango Herald on Jan. 16. According to the newspaper, the EPA intends to remove a pile of dirt and rock blocking the entrance. If that leads to a collapse of the portal, it could create a blowout that would put many people at risk, but no one knows how much water is behind the entrance.

Yet, the Bandora Mine isn’t the most polluting mine of the district.

The Gold King Mine, Red & Bonita, Mogul and the American Tunnel — also known as “The Big Four” — account for 80% of the contamination around Silverton.

Most mine owners left their properties without cleaning up, except for the latest mine operator in Silverton, Sunnyside Gold Corp, which signed a consent decree in 1996. Sunnyside agreed to “bulkhead” its mine, which consists of placing a plug in the opening, and to clean up abandoned mines nearby. Sunnyside operated a water treatment plant that the Kinross Gold Corporation took over in 2003, but the plant stopped operating after technical and financial troubles the next year.

“When Sunnyside Gold was treating the water before the consent decree, the water quality here was much better for the macro-invertebrates,” said John Ott, the general manager of Animas Water Company. “The benthic insects were a lot healthier in the river, and so was the water. The trout population was better. But when they stopped treating it, we got back to the high iron and aluminum, which are hard for the fish.”

Durango’s drinking water is groundwater and comes from the Florida River. In the early 20th century, Durango was using the Animas River as its water supply, but because the mines were dumping waste into the river, Durango switched to the nearby Florida River as its water source, because it was not being contaminated by mining waste or other dumping. Now the Animas River in Durango meets quality standards, and is used only as a backup water supply.

After the spill in 2015, Ott had to make sure drinking water was safe in Durango. “I worked closely with the state engineer’s office and the water quality control division to test our water and test other drinking water wells in the valley to make sure there wasn't going to be any effect from the spill,” Ott said. “And there wasn't.”

Ott also owns a ranch between Durango and Silverton and he recalled he had turned his irrigation water off for a day or two after the spill.

But farmers and ranchers in the region are used to dealing with the water impacted by mining.

Typically, Ott said, in the summertime, the big thunderstorms in Silverton turn the river orange.

Farmers and ranchers, like Ott, turn the headgate off on the main river and they don’t use that water to irrigate.

The same happened with the Gold King Mine.

Abandoned mines are a serious threat to the environment, especially to water quality, and to insect and fish populations.

But farther away from the mines, the water quality tends to improve. In Durango, for example, fish can be found in the Animas River because the town is 50 miles downstream from the mines, and so dilution has reduced the concentration of heavy metals in the river, compared to the situation in Silverton, which is closer to the mines.

Several studies over the years have shown that ptarmigans in the Animas River watershed have a lower life span. These little birds that look like chickens have been impacted by elevated levels of cadmium, which makes their bones brittle and cause them to die easily. Other species, like the American robin may, be at risk from lead exposure.

Liability and Action

Peter Butler was running the Animas River Stakeholders group as the coordinator until 2019, when the group ceased to exist.

Butler has been involved with mine reclamation issues since 1994, when the Colorado Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) agency started to look at the problems around Silverton and realized how complex the situation was.

“The stakeholders’ group was really one of the first watershed groups in the state of Colorado, but it was different than a lot of [the others],” Butler said. “The Animas stakeholders’ group was actually formed because of the fear of what will happen if somebody will impose something from the outside.”

The group partnered with other state and federal agencies and collected data for several years. The Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safety sampled about 160 draining mines and about 140 waste piles. They measured metal concentrations coming from different sites to identify the top priority sites. The stakeholders’ group then estimated how much work could be done. About 60 remediation projects were carried out by the stakeholders group and its partners.

But the Clean Water Act of 1972 makes third-party groups liable if they touch an abandoned site to clean it up. Cleanups, under the CWA, need to be complete and meet water quality standards. “But, passive treatment systems will never meet that 100% threshold, so a cleanup would be in violation of the CWA if 100% isn’t achieved,” Churchwell said. “ You can’t walk away once you assume responsibility to perform the cleanup.”

Churchwell and Trout Unlimited advocate for Good Samaritan legislation that would protect third-party groups if they improve the water quality to some extent and people who come into ownership of old mining sites they never mined themselves, who are currently liable under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980 (CERCLA), which created the Superfund program. Several bills have been proposed to Congress, but none have passed.

“It basically got to the point where the stakeholders’ group was kind of stuck,” Butler said. “We had done pretty much all the mine waste projects we had wanted to do or felt we could do, and we couldn't address the draining of the mines because of liability issues and financial issues.”

The group was able to do some capping and cleanup of mine waste projects, which generally requires little maintenance. But they couldn’t touch the acid draining mines, which release contaminated water into streams.

Once the mine sites became a Superfund site, the EPA took charge of the cleanup, and the stakeholders’ group was shut down in 2019. Butler said the EPA wasn’t paying much attention to them, so they decided to create a Community Advisory Group (CAG), which under CERCLA forces the EPA to interact with them, even though the agency doesn’t have to listen to them.

After the spill, one of the first projects the EPA conducted was the treatment of the Gold King Mine water.

Treating the Water

A 15-minute drive from Silverton, following the turns of Cement Creek towards the “ghost town” of Gladstone, a gray sheet metal building sits surrounded by gray and off-white silos. “That’s the water treatment plant,” Churchwell said.

The two most common “solutions” to clean up mine sites are water treatment plants and bulkheads. The problem with bulkheads is that they usually regulate the flow, but they don’t stop the contamination from happening. Bulkheads help to change the chemistry of the water, as acidity occurs when oxygen is present. So as the tunnel fills up with water behind a bulkhead, oxygen disappears, which makes the water cleaner.

Since October 2015, discharge from the Gold King Mine has been collected and treated at this 1.5-million-gallon interim treatment plant in Gladstone.

According to the EPA, approximately 800 million gallons of Gold King Mine water had been treated as of June, 2018.

The water treatment plant uses limestone to neutralize the acidity of the water.

The process produces 4,600 cubic yards of sludge a year, which are being managed at that location.

But the storage capacity is limited, and the EPA has been exploring other locations to manage the sludge.

“Right now, we have to rely on a lime treatment plant, but the reality is that's only treating one mine — and there are 48 mining or mining-related sites in this district,” Michelle Furi, the Mountain Studies Institute’s deputy director said. “It's really not tackling the problem, it’s barely even touching it.”

MSI encourages innovation in mine cleanups.

“Unfortunately, what we have right now is that sort of dinosaur of a lime treatment plant,” Furi said.

Treatment plants are costly because they require at least $1 million a year to run without any end in sight. The limestone needs to be mined elsewhere — for the Gladstone treatment plant, lime is mined at Monarch Pass, about 165 miles away.

“They [treatment plants] create this cumbersome byproduct of the sludge that then has to be dried out, then it has to be trucked and stored permanently somewhere else, and then capped,” Furi said. “The carbon footprint there is just astronomical.”

Before the spill in 2015, the EPA installed a bulkhead at Red & Bonita the same year, but they didn’t close the valve until summer of 2020. Then, they re-opened the valve in September, 2020 to drain down the impounded water behind the bulkhead. That water then gets sent to the Gladstone water treatment plant to be treated.

The experiment helped authorities to better understand the hydrology of the region.

MSI holds an annual innovation expo and a boot camp, which acts as an accelerator for startups. “There's a lot of technologies that are innovative, from drones and robotics to bio-cement,” Furi said.

But innovative solutions have to overcome a lack of money, and comply with a complex regulation framework.

“We see the EPA really wanting to engage ... and looking for innovative technologies to incorporate them where they can in these sites,” Furi said. “[But] we have a long way to go.”

Artificial wetlands could be one of the possible solutions. In 2019, contractors for the Bureau of Land Management were finishing a constructed wetlands with an iron terrace at Elk Tunnel, which are passive water treatment filters that remove iron from the water.

Electro-coagulation, which consists of injecting electricity into the water to remove heavy metals, has also been attempted at the American Tunnel in the district in 2012. .

“One of the challenges, there, is the volume,” Furi said. Most innovative technologies were tested on small volumes of water, and often cannot handle the large amounts that a water treatment plant can.

But if most innovative solutions haven’t been implemented at a larger scale, it’s also because each site has different geology, terrain and conditions that make it difficult to replicate an idea from one site to another.

“There's the politics behind it,” Furi said. “It's risk management, assessing what is the risk for testing, [for] putting capital behind these [methods] and [for] changing regulation.”

The EPA allocates about $1 billion to Superfund each year. In 2019, about $849 million were spent on cleanups, in addition approximately $4.7 million were allocated to monitoring the water at the Gold King Mine.

“They spent some money diverting drainage around, buying waste piles, but it’s unclear whether that’s made any difference whatsoever,” Butler said. “They have spent a lot of money doing studies there. Whether or not those studies are really going to get them to a solution is a little unclear.”

Having such a large Superfund district that includes 48 mines makes cleanup projects go slower, as some smaller sites could have required only a few thousand dollars to be cleaned up.

Superfund sites also require finding responsible parties to pay for cleanups. “The unfortunate thing about all this is there's a lot of money being spent on the legal end of things,” Terry Morris, a former engineer at Sunnyside Gold and a CAG member said. “In the 90s when I was here, the Animas Stakeholders group was little by little taking care of things that the local population deemed helpful, and then with the Superfund, it became a bureaucracy.”

The 2015 spill wasn’t the first incident. In 1978, the high alpine lake, Lake Emma, located about 12,000 feet up in the Rockies, crashed through the Sunnyside Mine where Morris was working. It blasted out the mine portal and turned the river black all the way down into New Mexico. It killed the fish in the river, and the mine was shut down for at least two years.

Since then, a lot of cleanups have happened, especially starting in the 1990s. Yet, the largest acid draining mines still need to be cleaned up.

“There's still some things to learn we don't fully understand: the mine pool underneath the Superfund site, for example, and how all the mines are connected and all springs are connected across the different watersheds in the Upper Animas,” Roberts said. “We don't know exactly how the fractures and mine tunnels interact.”

Roberts is now researching how these cleanup efforts may need to adjust to climate change.

“Especially with the increasing frequency of drought, a lot of these river levels are lower and that may mean that mine drainage may be a larger contribution to the surface water and thus metal concentrations are higher,” Roberts said. “Or it may mean that less water from snowmelt makes it into the mines and there may be less mine drainage in the future.”

Either way, it definitely has implications for water treatment moving forward, he said, and how the success of remediation should be measured.

Creede:

A Small Town Facing a Huge Problem

When visitors drive along the scenic Silver Thread byway, they pass through the town of Creede, Colorado and in front of a peculiar small store with a false wooden facade, typical of the Old West. The front yard is strewn with rusty mine carts, sand buckets, rocks, crystals, an old Coca Cola mini fridge, antiqued snowshoes, and a wooden tram tower. “Mines & Memories” is the name of the store, but it’s also symbolic of the enduring role that mining plays in the heart of Creede’s economy, whether for tourists or for residents.

The pictures hanging around Ken Wyley’s store show the annual Fourth of July competition that takes place over two days in Creede. Contestants among the town’s 300-400 residents shovel broken rock into a bucket and drill holes into a large rock using a handheld percussive tool powered by compressed air, called a jackleg drill.

“The mining competition, it's something that gets in the blood of the damned miners,” Wyley said. “They’re like rodeos to a cowboy.”

Ken Wyley, a former miner and a Creede long-time resident, in his Mines & Memories store.

But the mining past isn’t only reflected in Creede’s economy, but also in its water. Willow Creek, which flows through the town, is highly contaminated with heavy metals from the abandoned mines located to its north.

The Nelson Tunnel is responsible for most of the contamination, as it disgorges 365 gallons per minute into the creek. The tunnel was built to drain the water out of the underground workings of various nearby mines, and — along with the waste water from the nearby Solomon Mine — contributes about 48-50% of the contaminated water into the stream, rendering it unable to support fish and aquatic insects.

“The Nelson isn't the only problem, it's just the biggest,” said Heather Greenwolf, the executive director of the Headwaters Alliance, a nonprofit organization that works toward improving the watershed in Creede.

Since 2008, the tunnel and the nearby Commodore Waste Rock Pile have been designated as a Superfund site.

Last fall, the EPA proposed an $11 million plan that would install bulkheads inside the Nelson tunnel to regulate the contaminated water flow and prevent the sudden release of 20 million gallons of impounded water.

The EPA working at the Nelson Tunnel/Commodore Waste Rock Pile Superfund site.

The goal is to avoid a collapse of the mine portal and potential floods that could cause a fish kill in the Rio Grande River, as the high rate flow would prevent the dilution of metals. But the project won’t improve the creek’s water quality.

This is Creede.

The acid mine drainage discharges coming from the mines and tunnels located to the north of Creede makes Willow Creek unable to sustain aquatic life.

But as the water reaches the Rio Grande River, metals are being diluted, which makes the Rio Grande River suitable for fish habitat.

Yet Willow Creek is the single source of zinc into the Rio Grande.

Before the area became a Superfund site, the Willow Creek Reclamation Committee (WCRC), a community-led organization formed in 1997, was working on mine cleanups.

But like other community groups, including the Animas River Stakeholder Group in Durango and Silverton, the WCRC hit a wall when it came to cleaning up sites that have acidic discharges, like the Nelson Tunnel, as they would become liable under the Clean Water Act as soon as they start any remediation efforts.

In 2016, the WCRC merged with the Headwaters Alliance, which has now taken over communications between the EPA, and the community and the companies implementing environmental projects.

In 2005, the Commodore Waste Rock Pile collapsed and washed out into West Willow Creek due to a 20-year flood event.

The Bachelor road that leads to the mines was washed out.

“It was a big mess,” Zeke Ward, the former WCRC chairman, said. “For about a week, they (the county) had to continually remove that material from the creek to keep the water from getting out.”

The county’s goal was to contain the incident by keeping the water flowing through the flume, which was built in 1950 to maintain the creek’s water flow as the town was built in a floodplain.

From Silver Boom to Superfund

Before the mining era, the Ute tribe inhabited the area. Then, in the mid- and late-19th century, settlers and tourists came to fish and enjoy the hot springs and the Utes were forced out of the Creede area. In the 1890s, the town boomed with silver mining.

Nelson Tunnel and mine workers in 1892. Photo courtesy of the Creede Historical Society

Mine worker in 1918 at the Commodore. Photo courtesy of the Creede Historical Society

The tailings, waste from the mines, were casually dumped into the river.

“It's only in the last 30 years that people have started paying attention,” said Wyley, a former miner and the store owner.

The WCRC, when it was still around, removed contaminated material at the Amethyst 5 Mine, and did an impound on site, and capped it. This improved the water quality and fish returned to the creek, Ward said.

The second main polluter in Creede is the Solomon Mine, which releases cadmium, zinc and lead into the creek, but isn't listed as a Superfund site.

After the 2005 incident, the EPA suggested that the area become a Superfund site. But the community didn’t want a large designation, instead they wanted the Superfund site to be kept small. The EPA decided to limit the Superfund site designation to the Nelson tunnel and Commodore Waste Rock Pile.

“We don't want the EPA to list the Solomon [Mine], but at the same time we know nobody can touch that until there is a Good Samaritan Law for abandoned mines lands in place,” Greenwolf said.

Stabilization work previously took place at the Solomon Mine to make sure waste rocks don’t fall into the creek. “But that doesn’t stop water from touching them and going through them, and leeching,” said Alex Handloff, who works with Greenwolf as the Headwaters Alliance’s development and engagement coordinator. “What's the long-term solution?”

In 2008, the Nelson Tunnel and the Commodore Waste Rock Pile were designated as Superfund sites.

Between 2008-2010, the Commodore Waste Rock Pile was stabilized, and mine waste was removed from West Willow Creek.

The Nelson Tunnel still discharges copper, lead, zinc and cadmium, also called acid mine drainage discharges.

The Nelson Tunnel portal collapsed.

The only way for the EPA to gain access is to use the Commodore Level 5, which was stabilized by the EPA.

Disclaimer: This animation is not to scale

The lifespan of their work is 15 years, wrote in an email Dania Zinner, the EPA project manager for the Nelson Tunnel/Commodore Waste Rock Superfund Site. “But the steel sets used for stabilization should last longer depending upon the amount of corrosion over the years.”

West Willow Creek, which is heavily contaminated by the Nelson Tunnel, merged with East Willow Creek, which is less polluted.

The contamination is being diluted, but it’s still very high as it keeps flowing across town.

As time goes by, it's hard for the Headwaters Alliance to sustain interest. “There’s a lot of people in our community who care that there's a Superfund site,” said Greenwolf. “But we don't have anybody beating the drums, because it isn't going to go anywhere.”

Ward, of the now disbanded WCRC, agreed with this sentiment. “When you’re volunteering your time, roadblocks can seem insurmountable. People want to do something, but it becomes a little bit difficult to maintain interest (over time),” said Ward.

“The six miles of Willow Creek that have been impacted by historic mining activity is not even a blip on the radar screen, but it's close to town,” Ward said. And the hope, he said, is that one day Willow Creek will provide the community and visitors with recreational opportunities.

Zeke Ward, the former chairman of the Willow Creek Reclamation Committee and Creede long-time resident.

In the upper watershed of East Willow Creek, above the Solomon mine, there are healthy fishing stocks and higher levels of aquatic insects.

“We just did benthic sampling on five sites in the whole watershed,” Greenwolf said. “Everything above the Nelson and everything above the Solomon was within normal limits.”

This indicates that fish were present before mining, she added.

“There's a whole trophic effect that happens,” Greenwolf said. The lack of fish leads to a lack of birds, who would normally spread plant seeds through their excrement. The resulting absence of vegetation, especially lower in the floodplain, reduces habitat for other animals.

Expensive Repairs for a Small Town

The town gets its drinking water supply from wells that draw water from a deep aquifer located south of town, far away from the contamination. But another issue stemming from the legacy of mining is the impact on the town’s sewage system, which reportedly has high levels of heavy metals at the water treatment plant.

A 2019 commissioned study by the town explains that Willow Creek, which contains heavy metals like zinc and cadmium, may have contaminated the groundwater. The groundwater then infiltrates the cracked sewer pipes, and then flows to the water treatment plant. The amount of metals in the sewage system at Creede’s treatment plant exceeds the state’s limitations. The Colorado Department of Public Health and the Environment (CDPHE) has approached the town and issued notices of violations. They asked the municipal authorities to repair the pipes to meet water standards.

Creede's municipal sewage treatment plant, located to the south of the town, reportedly has high levels of heavy metals and exceeds the state's limitations

Creede has been trying to solve this issue for several years. The town is planning to start repairing the pipes next summer, but the price tag is high.

The town has asked the EPA for help, Barry Steinberg, the town’s lawyer, said. “The EPA’s focus is on stopping another catastrophic event, but that doesn't stop the acid mine drainage from continuing to seep and run down to us,” Steinberg said.

To repair the pipes would cost an estimated $3-5 million. So the town is seeking financial assistance from Colorado’s Department of Local Affairs. But Louis Fineberg, the town’s manager, thinks the DLA’s grants won’t be enough.

“Creede is a small place, the people here are not wealthy, and they're being asked to do a very large project that really was not (theirs),” Fineberg said. “Creede is very dependent on its summer tourists, and a big part of that revolves around water quality because people are out there fishing. If that goes away, then Creede is really in trouble.”

From 2017 to 2020, the EPA and Pioneer, a company which conducted mining operations in Creede from 1983 to 1989, engaged in extensive litigation to cover the cost of the cleanups. In September of 2020, Pioneer signed a consent decree with the EPA that will make Pioneer pay nearly $5.8 million to the EPA to clean up at the Superfund site.

Saving Creede’s Mining Heritage

While driving up in the mountains along the Bachelor Loop, a road that forms the main tourist attraction for Creede, the former towns of Bachelor and Weaver have now disappeared. Most structures there were built out of spruce and have now rotted away, leaving only large open fields.

Most of these towns were built very close to the mines because access was otherwise difficult. The construction of the Nelson Tunnel made access easier for the miners who worked at the Amethyst mine. They were subsequently able to live downtown and use the tunnel to access their workplace, according to Richard Huston’s “A Silver Camp Called Creede. A Century of Mining.”

Only the ore houses near the Nelson Tunnel are still visible. But the structures are becoming brittle.

Recently, the authorities in Mineral County, where Creede resides, have been working with the EPA to become the landowners of the Superfund site, which will include the ore houses.

The county’s administrator, Janelle Kukuk, said the properties will be donated to Mineral County so they can rehabilitate the structures and keep their mining heritage intact. The county will also become the owners of the Nelson Tunnel and Commodore Level 5, which currently are privately owned. The goal for the EPA is to eliminate the current land owner’s liability, but it wouldn’t transfer the liability to the county.

“It's important for us to maintain that iconic set of structures and make it something that does go into perpetuity,” Kukuk said. “One of the buildings, if it stays standing for another 18 months, we're going to be really really lucky. We’re hoping we can get in there before it truly does fall off the side of the mountain.”

Kukuk came to Creede in 1984 to work at the Homestake Mine as an accounts payable clerk. She worked for about eight months before the mine closed down. It took a decade, she said, before Creede could transition to a tourist town.

The mining legacy also affects the housing market. Miners were used to moving a lot, so they didn’t want to make an investment in a home, which led to the creation of trailer parks on the south end of town.

“We don’t have a good housing market,” Kukuk said. “No one's kept up the trailer parks, and they've kind of degraded. They're still livable, but they're not necessarily attractive.”

Will Mining Come Back?

“There's this quiet potentiality that the EPA may work with Rio Grande Silver to give them permission to re-establish mining in Creede, and if they were to do that they would de-water the Nelson Tunnel, which would effectively solve the problem,” Greenwolf said.

Zinner confirmed that the EPA is communicating with Rio Grande Silver, a mining company and a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hecla, a mining giant that owns the entire Creede Mining District, regarding the possibility of the Bulldog Mine being reopened.

The Bulldog Mine is located to the south of Creede, along an unpaved county road that winds up the mountain.

Randy McClure, a senior geologist from a family of longtime miners, is now managing Rio Grande Silver.

This exploration and pre-development project works towards the return of mining in Creede.

TThe project used to be Homestead Mine Co., which operated the Bulldog Mine, but shut it down in 1985. About 10 years ago, Hecla came in and bought the entire district through Rio Grande Silver.

Randy McClure, a geologist at the firm, explained that they’re now looking to re-open the mine as silver prices go up. They’re tackling several issues to avoid being sued and held liable for water treatment in perpetuity.

“We have a reclamation plan in place,” McClure said. They intend to put the tailings into the ground, cover it with topsoil and seed it with natural vegetation.

McClure said that the tunnels for the Bulldog Mine don’t have water coming out, unlike the Nelson Tunnel.

“Having a Superfund site next door definitely heightens everybody's awareness of what's going on,” McClure said. “The EPA in late 2019-2020 has changed and become more willing to work with us.”

When Homestead was operating, the flow coming out of the Nelson Tunnel was reduced because they treated the water through their own treatment plant. But once they closed, water started to trickle out of the Nelson Tunnel again.

There is hope now that by re-opening the Bulldog mine, it would solve the problem with the Nelson Tunnel. “However, the expectation is that the water outflow would eventually return to current levels,” Zinner wrote in an email.

“We keep hoping that maybe Hecla would get something going,” said Wyley, the former miner and the Mines & Memories store owner. “That would bring prosperity to town, school systems would fill up with kids, businesses would grow, people would have jobs — although there's not that many miners left in Creede.”

Aspen:

Is a Cleanup Possible?

Once a year, Aspen resident Patti Clapper gets a special letter in the mail.

“Anyone excavating or exposing more than 1 cubic yard of soil (must) obtain a Soil Removal Permit,” it says.

The warning, which is sent out to all nearby residents because of the presence of lead in the soil, explains why Clapper grows vegetables in 28-inch raised beds outside her 1960s trailer home. It is also a remnant of her decade-long fight against the federal government.

Clapper lives on a Superfund site in northeastern Aspen, called Smuggler Mountain.

The site is one of the few in the state of Colorado that was delisted from the National Priority List of the Superfund Program. It was first listed in 1986 due to the presence of high levels of lead and cadmium — which can be dangerous for young children and pregnant women — in the soil.

In 1988, Clapper was a nurse, a mother with a 3-year-old son and pregnant with her second child. She had just moved to the trailer park she lives in, which was built on top of tailings, mining waste which in this case was contaminated with lead from a century of silver mining. In the 1880s and 1890s, Aspen was one of the world’s most productive silver-producing districts in the country, and mines going into Smuggler Mountain were among the largest in town.

Currently, about 1,000 people live in the neighborhood that includes Clapper’s mobile home park, and most are local workers. Although on the National Priority List earlier, it was not until 1988-1989 that the EPA started to come into town and proposed a cleanup plan, which meant bulldozers coming into the neighborhood.

Clapper, who is now serving her fifth term as a Pitkin County commissioner, was one of the most vocal residents against the listing, as she feared that the cleanup of the neighborhood would make the lead airborne and more dangerous for her children.

Clapper, who is now working as a county commissioner, was one of the most vocal residents against the listing, as she feared that the cleanup of the neighborhood would bring more dangers to the health of her children than necessary.

The listing occurred after a graduate student from Colorado State University started to research the presence of lead and cadmium in the soil in the Smuggler Mobile Home Park in 1981. He found elevated levels of heavy metals in garden vegetables and flowers, up to 20,000 parts per million for lead, about 20 times more than the acceptable levels of lead as defined by the EPA. The student, David Boon, informed the residents, the city and the county about his findings. The following year, the EPA started to investigate the extent of the contamination, and then became fully involved at the site in 1983, at the request of the county. They identified concentrations of leads up to 46,000 parts per million.

“There was a misconception on the part of many,” said Tom Dunlop, the Superfund site manager working for Pitkin County. At the time, Dunlop worked as the county’s environmental health director. The intent of the Superfund program, which was brand new at the time, was misinterpreted, he said.

The county thought it was money the government would give them to clean up a site. In the 1980s, the area around the trailer park was littered with debris left over from the mining era. But after the county sent a letter to the EPA inviting them to Aspen, the EPA project manager came into town and met Dunlop.

“He had a pad of paper with a whole schedule of events that the EPA was going to do over the next two years, and after talking to him for a couple of hours I realized that this was way bigger than anything the county commissioners had ever thought about when they wrote that letter,” Dunlop said. “There wasn't free money, but it was payback money,” as the EPA would soon start looking for responsible parties.

The Superfund site includes two sites, Operable Unit 1, which is the Clapper’s neighborhood...

and Operable Unit 2, which includes the Smuggler Mine.

When Clapper started to learn more about the presence of the EPA in her neighborhood, she came across studies about sites with higher levels of lead and real risks of exposure. So she started to wonder why her home was actually part of a Superfund site.

“They needed a feather in their cap in order to show that they've been able to do something,” Clapper said. “What better place, with the media attention, the notoriety of Aspen, Colorado, the fact it was lead in young children. They were saving us!”

The EPA said in an email that the listing of the site was justified at the time by “the presence of concentrations of lead as high as 46,000 parts per million (ppm), well above EPA's cleanup level at the time of 1,000 ppm.” Smuggler Mountain’s site score from the Hazard Ranking System (HRS), which was utilized to assess the relative risk associated with actual or potential releases of hazardous substances from the site based on data collected in EPA's preliminary assessment and site inspection, indicated that it was eligible to be placed on the NPL, according to the EPA.

In 1988, the EPA announced to the residents of the Superfund site, which covers about 110 acres, they could become liable for part of the cost of the cleanup. The EPA wanted to dig up contaminated soil to clean it, but in doing so, Clapper feared that the lead could become airborne and absorbed through the lungs.

“They were not going to move us out of our neighborhood. We're going to have bulldozers,” Clapper said.

Clapper told the EPA she was also concerned about dust getting into her home. The EPA said they would seal the trailers.

“That's putting us in a tomb for the summer, we can't live in a trailer that is sealed with plastic wrap,” Clapper told the EPA.

TThe EPA conducted the first blood tests on residents in 1990.

“My daughter was the first one, she was a year and a half old. She was the first one stuck with a needle,” Clapper said. “I said [to the EPA] I want to know if my daughter's at risk. And if my daughter's at risk, this place will be cleaned up in a heartbeat, if my daughter's not at risk, you're out of here.”

When the results came in, her daughter’s blood level for lead was nearly undetectable, around 0.09 micrograms per deciliter, according to Clapper. The Centers of Disease Control defined toxic lead level as anything above 10 micrograms per deciliter at the time (the CDC updated its recommendation to 5 micrograms per deciliter in 2012). All the other children in the neighborhood tested less than 10 micrograms per deciliter, except one teenager who later admitted riding his motorcycle across the mine dumps. On average, they tested around 3 micrograms per deciliter. But the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry and the EPA disregarded the results because the study lacked statistical significance.

In 1993, a EPA report said they asked an independent panel of lead experts and technical advisors to assess the risks linked to lead dust. Following the panel’s recommendations, the EPA decided not to include soil removal in its final remedy. The panel also asked for a blood lead surveillance program, which was conducted in 1996 and 1998, to monitor the blood level of the kids over time. The study also “shows no impact of this exposure on blood lead levels of children at the site. Consequently, EPA has concluded that further remediation of the OU1 soils is not needed to adequately protect human health,” according to the county’s five-year review report published in 2007.

After Clapper — who was featured in The New Yorker, on John Stossel’s 20/20 news program, and who travelled to Washington D.C. to talk to her senators — spent another 10 years battling the agency, the institutional controls document was signed and the site was delisted.

But there were conditions attached, such as a five-year review from the EPA. The EPA’s jurisdiction for day-to-day activities was transferred to the county and the city, which still need to report any changes to the EPA. But it was required to send the notice letter every year to the Smuggler residents, and to send a letter every six months to the EPA and the state of Colorado’s health department addressing a list of questions and declaring any violations or anomalies.

“If we don't do that, the consent decree allows the EPA to take more of an active role in Smuggler again because we would have failed in our obligation to the consent decree,” Dunlop said. “It's not going to go away.”

Residents need to fill out a permit before doing any excavation work, as soon as they move more than one cubic yard of soil. The soil then goes to the county’s landfill. Typically, between two to 10 permits are submitted to the city a year, according to CJ Oliver, Aspen’s environmental health manager.

Handling the Contaminated Soil

The Pitkin County landfill, also called Pitkin County Solid Waste Center, is located about 10 miles out of town, along the highway.

It is nestled in the mountains, with probably one of the best views a landfill can have.

“Why is Smuggler a Superfund site, and [the land] over at the base of Aspen Mountain is not a Superfund site?” asked Cathy Hall, Pitkin County Solid Waste director, noting that other parts of the town of Aspen are built on tailings like the Smuggler Mobile Home Park, but this question remains unanswered 20 years later.

Each time soil arrives from Smuggler to the landfill, Hall gets a notification, she said, as the soil from the Superfund site cannot be mixed with other soil.

The Smuggler soil is then used to cover trash in the landfill. At the end of each day, the landfill workers cover the trash with clean soil so rodents and bears can’t get it.

The Smuggler soil is then used to cover trash in the landfill. At the end of each day, the landfill workers cover the trash with clean soil so rodents and bears can’t get it.

“The soils can come here without any additional testing. It's all been tested extensively,” Hall said.

Smuggler residents have to pay for the handling of their soil, but they negotiated the price tag 20 years ago. They pay $15 a ton, the rate for cover dirt, instead of $93.75 a ton, the trash rate.

Hall said that last year they got 823 tons of Smuggler dirt, which is beneficial for the landfill since they need cover soil anyway.

Since the county is listed as a responsible party for Smuggler Superfund, the county can collect around 15 cents per ton of trash deposited at the Pitkin County landfill that goes into the Colorado Hazardous Substance Response Fund, Dunlop wrote in an email. The fund is used by the county to offset expenses incurred to administer the program.

Hall explained that the Smuggler soil is not leaching any lead into the groundwater or the environment.

“The galena formation and the configuration of the metals combined with the host rock makes it inert, so we’re not getting any leaching,” Dunlop said.

“The Superfund site has created a level of awareness,” said Oliver, the city of Aspen’s environmental health manager. “When we see potential development happening in other areas of town that have mining waste, we're able to prescribe essentially the same level of health protection for those areas as we have with the Superfund site.” That protection includes soil testing, soil mitigation and dirt disposal.

Clean Water

Unlike Silverton and Creede, the watershed in Aspen isn’t contaminated by its mining past, which also has helped to boost recreational activities in Aspen.

“The lead from the Superfund site seems very well bound in the soil and rock,” Oliver said. “It doesn't tend to leach out into the water.”

Near the Smuggler Mine, another shaft, the Mollie Gibson shaft, is discharging water continuously into the nearby river.

But the water flowing out of that shaft does not have elevated lead concentrations and even supports aquatic life.

“It’s totally clean,” said Chris Preusch, the former owner of the Smuggler Mine. “We’d go down about 86 feet-90 feet and we would hit the water level.”

Preusch explained that most of the gold mines have higher acidity rates, with high levels of aluminum and iron. The Smuggler Mine and the Mollie Gibson shaft were used for silver mining.

“The dirtiest [result] is when the mines are in operation, because when you’re operating underground, and you’re pumping water, you’re pumping a lot of sand and silts containing the metals,” Preusch said.

The Smuggler Mine was pumping until 1918, he added. They were discharging 7,200 gallons a minute in the area below Aspen, and this water went to the Roaring Fork River, which made the river unsuitable for fish. Aquatic life came back once the water started to get cleaner after pumping stopped.

But the Smuggler Mine has a dual permit, both an excavation permit that allows them to extract 25 tons a day, and a tourism permit that lets it hold tours for tourists and local students.

Preusch and a group of friends bought the mining property in 1994 before selling it in 2015. But Preusch and his colleague, Jay Parker, still manage the property on behalf of the new owner, Aspen Green Mountain.

Chris Preusch is the former owner of Smuggler Mine. The EPA comes once every five years to inspect the property.

Nowadays, the EPA comes once every five years to inspect the property. The mine needs to be compliant with three elements: making sure the entrance gate is closed, dust mitigation and water mitigation, by making sure water stays on site.

The inspection typically goes pretty quickly. It only takes five minutes for the EPA inspector to come here, look around and leave, according to Preusch.

Preusch said that he and the county are struggling to pass the responsibilities on to the next generation. Dunlop, who works for the county environmental health department, retired in 2001 but since no one else had his level of expertise, he is still in charge of the Superfund site for the county. Dunlop is now training the current environmental health director, so that one day he can fully retire.

There’s also a lot of staff turnover at the EPA, so people who have been around for a long time, like Preusch, need to explain the story and the issues surrounding the site every time someone new comes along.

“Most people these days aren't willing to even get in 100 yards of an EPA document,” Preusch said. “Nobody's willing to read between the lines.”

In 1994, when Preusch and a friend stepped up to take ownership of the property and take on the EPA, their attorney quit. “My attorney, who was one of my very best friends' father, pulled me aside and he said, ‘Chris if you do this I can no longer represent you’,” Preusch said.

But Preusch said that he knew that the EPA didn’t have a case against them. After the site got delisted, Smuggler was buried as deep in the file cabinet as possible, he said.

With a permit that allows them to extract only 25 tons a day, the mine isn’t profitable anymore. Preusch hopes that one day the mine will be only a tourist site that keeps the memory and history of mining alive.

The slopes of the Aspen Mountain ski resort are pierced with mine tunnels.

The mine was sold in 2015, but Chris Preusch and one of his friends still manage the property on behalf of the new owner, Aspen Green Mountain.

“What’s truly amazing is all the people skiing on that mountain over there,” Preusch said, pointing toward the slopes of the Aspen Mountain ski resort visible from Smuggler Mine. Referring to the mine tunnels that pierce Aspen Mountain, he mused, “If they had any idea how much they weren’t skiing on, underneath, and there are huge holes…”.

Looking around the mines, along the sides of the property, several multi-million houses are now built on the Superfund property.

“We are surrounded by big wealth, and if the EPA wants to wander back in here, they're going to get mired down,” Preusch said. “All these people will get together, they'll combine their money, and they will tie them up for centuries.”

Credits

Satellite Maps: Google Earth
Aspen Smuggler Superfund Map: Pitkin County
2005 flood in Creede: Creede Historical Society
Gold King Mine Spill: Mountain Studies Institute