30 years ago – August 8, 1986
One of the Environmental Protection Agency’s ideas on how to fix the Gregory Incline and Tailings is the installation of a culvert around the site so North Clear Creek would not erode the tailings pile. Some locals have said a flood would either wash out the culvert or block it with debris, thus creating damage throughout Black Hawk.
The Editor’s Opinion by Janet Davis: Whatever happened to government for the people and by the people? It’s oppressively on the people these days. Especially in Gilpin County. First, the feds, through the EPA, have decided to spend a half a million bucks to preserve a Black Hawk mine dump in all its historic “beauty,” when a bulldozer could easily, and cheaply, clean up the mess. Gilpin County people weren’t asked. Then, the state folks have decided Gilpin County will be a dandy place for a women’s prison. Gilpin County people weren’t asked. Now, it looks like the Jefferson County commissioners are leaning toward approving their own rock quarry in Clear Creek Canyon near the road most of us have to travel frequently. Again, Gilpin County people weren’t asked. Soon, the Gilpin County commissioners will have to decide if the Gilpin Quarry can be constructed next to Hwy 119 only about a mile up from U.S. 6. No doubt there are many good rock gathering places in Gilpin County, but the junction of Hwy 6 and Hwy 119 isn’t one of them. Despite what Commissioner Leslie Williams implied in her letter last week (“the tourist can see mining through a one hundred year span from yesterday’s shafts to today’s open pits; hurt tourism trade, I think not”), rock quarries are not tourist attractions. Nor do tourists come to Gilpin County to look at ugly old mine dumps, which are nothing but scars on what the tourists really come to see – the mountains. The beautiful mountains, our most precious and fragile asset. Quarry standards in Jefferson and Boulder counties are tough, so it is likely that quarry operators will continue to go for the next closest areas—Gilpin and Clear Creek— to feed the metro area’s hunger for rock and gravel products. That’s fine, and it could be lucrative, but not next to the highway everyone uses. The precedence Gilpin County commissioners set when they make a decision about the Gilpin Quarry will be with us forever. It is preposterous to think that reclamation will ever turn an open pit mine into what it once was. Enough is enough. More desecration of land we do not need. Let’s stand up and say no to poorly conceived ideas, no matter how much money they would generate, while we still have something left to protect. What will be Gilpin’s future? Do we want to start now to improve what we have, or do we want to be the gravel pit (arm pit) of Colorado?
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