“Today’s mining is a lot different than it was 100 years ago, ” Gaudielle says. Andy Gaudielle is the project manager for a Canadian company called Calico Resources that is proposing the Grassy Mountain gold mine in Eastern Oregon. Modern mining companies say that this sort of contamination is a thing of the past. And the scars of open pit mines dot the Western landscape from mining companies scraping away the land and drenching the rubble with cyanide to leach out the gold. Mercury mines such as the Black Butte mine outside of Cottage Grove, now a Superfund site, are believed to be a source of the high mercury levels that lead to warnings about eating some of Oregon’s fish. The mercury used to separate gold from the rocks and minerals still poisons streams and lingers around mining sites. Mining for gold, precious metals and other hardrock minerals has a toxic legacy in the West. But gold can be volatile, in investments or the environment.ĭrilling at Grassy Mountain in Eastern Oregon. With prices like that, it’s no wonder that people want to buy and sell gold plucked from the broken necklaces in your jewelry box or panned and stripped from Oregon’s pristine rivers and public lands. Gold has been looking like a safe-haven investment these days while the stock market fluctuates wildly. Miners from California are flocking to southern Oregon’s rivers, and the first commercial gold mine in the state in a very long time has been proposed in Malheur County by a Canadian company. And thanks to the skyrocketing price of gold - analysts predict an ounce of gold will sell for more than $2,000 before the end of the year - there’s a gold rush for Oregon’s public lands. He says even Washington has more gold than Oregon.īut thanks to our geologic history of volcanoes and mountain formation we do have the precious metal. Compared to other Western states like Idaho and California, “on the whole Oregon is not very well endowed,” when it comes to gold, UO geology professor Mark Reed says.
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