Plans are afoot to reopen the Idaho-Maryland mine in Grass Valley, a family-friendly area 50 miles northeast of Sacramento.
That mine — now flooded — has not had hard hats in it since 1956, but a Canadian company is convinced that more than one million ounces of gold were left behind. “This was a world-class ore body,” said David Watkinson, chief executive of the Emgold Mining Corporation, which is spearheading the project.
The Idaho-Maryland project is further from being shovel-ready than the Lincoln Mine: pumping out more than 50 years of water will take time, after all, as does completing a variety of environmental impact reports and permitting processes. And the prospect of a newly opened mine has also been met with opposition from some local activists, whose worries are rooted in both the legacy of the first Gold Rush — including contaminated and sediment-filled rivers and hillsides denuded by hydraulic mining — and by more modern quality-of-life concerns like traffic, noise and water rights.
“We’d be looking at reopening a mine in the middle of a city,” said Ralph Silberstein, the president of a grass-roots group called Citizens Looking at the Impacts of Mining in Grass Valley (or Claim-GV). “Which is not a good idea.”
Like many of the other towns in the Mother Lode, Grass Valley has long since moved its economy away from mining toward things like software and tourism. The Gold Rush itself peaked in 1852, according to the state’s Department of Conservation, when nearly four million ounces were discovered in California. By 1971, when the nation went off the gold standard, less than 2,000 ounces were produced in California.
But the rebound in price has led to a rebound in production. Domestic gold mine production in 2010 increased for the first time in a decade, according to the United States Geological Survey. Nevada is by far the largest gold-producing state, producing roughly four times that of all other states combined.
Early California prospectors used pans and their hands to find nuggets in freezing cold streams. Methods soon became more intrusive, however, with machinery and dynamite being used to dig into hard rock and lethal chemicals like mercury and cyanide used to help process the crushed ore.
And while today’s methods are safer, Izzy Martin, chief executive of the Sierra Fund, a nonprofit group devoted to preservation of the Sierra Nevada, says there are several challenges to mining old mines, including what previous companies might have left behind.
“There’s a lot of toxic materials in there,” Ms. Martin said. “And you have to clean it up.”
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This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
My opinions are my own and and DD I post should be confirmed as unbiased
