Pits in the Crown Jewels

It was a day of superlatives in a place of superlatives. I had thought I threw a long line until I watched the guy fishing with me--Steve Rajeff, who can cast farther than any other man on the planet [see: Ask FR&R July/October]. Together we eased down the clean gravel of the river that sustains the world's biggest salmon runs--the Kvichak, 300 hundred yards from where it collects water from the biggest lake in Alaska. Now, in late September, the giant rainbows of Lake Iliamna were dropping down to snark the last eggs from the last moribund pink salmon. From 20 feet they'd chase down the Globugs Steve had tied that morning. We didn't have anything with which to weigh the fish that fried my reel, but it dwarfed the 12-pound silver I'd caught two days earlier. Rajeff's photo of it hangs on my office wall. Anglers who haven't fished the Kvichak won't believe me when I tell them it's not a steelhead.

That's how I got hooked on the Bristol Bay area of southwest Alaska. No place on earth is wilder or more beautiful or offers finer salmonid fishing. In the Kvichak, for example, you can catch all five Pacific salmon, rainbows, dollies, char and grayling. The rivers, lakes, mountains, valleys, tundra and forests of Bristol Bay are aptly called "America's crown jewels." I cannot get enough of them. But the day may not be far off when you and I will get no more because, if a small Canadian mining company with no track record and backed by Middle Eastern money of unknown origin gets its way, they will be ruined.

Some of the fish and wildlife will, of course, survive. Many of the topographical features will remain intact. But the essence and magic of the place will be destroyed utterly and irrevocably. The Bristol Bay area will no longer be wild and remote. It will become a populated, easily accessed, industrial-waste storage facility.

Even if the Vancouver-based Northern Dynasty Mines made a habit of keeping its word, its copious promises would mean nothing. This is because its modus operandi is to find and stake deposits, then hawk them to larger companies who do whatever they please. Having never developed a mine, North-ern Dynasty proposes to strip-mine what it describes as the nation's largest gold deposit and second-largest copper deposit near Upper Talarik Creek and the lower Koktuli river in the Nushagak and Kvichak river drainages, just south of Lake Clark National Park and Preserve and 15 miles northwest of Lake Iliamna. [For more information on the Nushagak River, see "Surviving The Nush" on page 24 of this issue.]

In addition to cyanide, with which gold is extracted from ore, the operation would release sulfuric acid, arsenic, lead, cadmium, zinc, mercury and sundry other toxins known to kill fish and wildlife, cause cancer and destroy nerve tissue. A witch's brew of these and other poisons would be held in a 20-square-mile lagoon consisting of former wild-salmonid habitat in what is called the "Ring of Fire," a volatile seismic zone beset by major earthquakes (including one in the spring of 2005) at the base of Mt. Iliamna, an active volcano, and flanked by two other active volcanoes. In fact, all the past and present volcanism make the site one of the world's richest sulfide mineralization areas, meaning that production of acids and toxic heavy metals would be way higher than at other strip mines.

When the toxic-waste lagoons downslope from hard-rock mines fail, results are always catastrophic. So great is the threat to the Bristol Bay area that the DC-based environmental group American Rivers took the unusual step of including this land of many waters on its 2006 list of the nation's 10 most endangered "rivers."

Northern Dynasty has yet to seek permits, but already it has established a long record of disturbing actions, deceptive and false statements, contradictions, and broken promises. For example, it assured the public that it wouldn't be using cyanide. Then--when the environmental community pressed, pointing out that extracting gold from this kind of ore isn't economically feasible without cyanide--the company allowed that it would use cyanide after all but only the "vat process" and not the more dangerous "heap-leach process." It publishes such outrageous untruths as: "Mercury in wild salmon comes from the ocean, not from mining or other land-use practices."

After promising to "stay out of the Upper Talarik Creek [watershed] because it is sensitive fish habitat" (as if the rest of the proposed site were not), it promptly began drilling test holes in the watershed.With that, it applied for water rights to Upper Talarick, the better to divert flow into the artificial lake where it will store toxic mine waste. Northern Dynasty's promise of "no net loss of fish" sounded alarmingly like a plan to festoon Bristol Bay with hatchery stock. But when anglers and enviros protested, the company quickly backed off and assured all hands that it wouldn't be flinging around any rubber salmonids. However, it offered no reasonable or cogent explanation of how it intended to duplicate Christ's fish miracle.

The Bristol Bay Times reports that Northern Dynasty's intense lobbying campaign includes paying all travel, lodging and food expenses for the local officials it fetches to Anchorage for its "community meetings" and then, on top of this, slipping each a cash-stuffed envelope ($600 for a three-day meeting). According to documents obtained by Alaskans for Responsible Mining, Northern Dynasty has hired as a lobbyist one Duane Gibson--former top aide to Jack Abramoff, the convicted felon who bilked his clients out of an estimated $66 million.

One of the few accurate statements I found in reams of company records is the following, from the 2004 Annual Report: "As Canadian citizens and residents certain of Northern Dynasty's directors and officers may not be subject themselves to US legal proceedings, so that recovery on judgments issued by US courts may be difficult or impossible." Not exactly an encouraging revelation when one considers that if these same Canadians get their way, they will severely damage American commercial and recreational salmon resources with respective values of $100 million and $77 million annually.