It's time to kill Green River copper mine proposal

State effort to protect pristine volcano-area watershed would be fatal blow

This idea should never have been born, but it’s time to die may finally be here.

For nearly two decades, a Canadian company has tried to develop a copper mine in the upper Green River, a tributary of the Toutle River that is returning to pristine condition following the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens.

There’s no worse place in Southwest Washington to tear open the earth to extract minerals.  

With its origins in the Mount Margaret Backcountry north of the volcano,  the upper Green has been almost untouched by modern humans. It was a roadless area before the volcano's 1980 eruption, which leveled the forests in the river's headwaters.

The river and land have recovered. The Green again sparkles and mirrors tall peaks as it flows downstream to eventually unite with the North Fork of the Toutle River and, later, the Cowlitz River.

The Green had been important to native American people for centuries. It's also is a state-designated gene bank for wild steelhead. It's eligible for Wild and Scenic River status. A surviving patch of old growth forest —  informally known as ‘The Valley of the Giants”  — flanks a four-mile stretch of river near the far northern edge of the volcano’s blast zone.

A hiker explores the Valley of the Giants along the Green River in his photo by Susan Saul.

As part of the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument, the upper Green is important to the study of ecological recovery process. It's also hallowed ground: A young Longview couple, Terry Crall and Karen Varner, died there during the eruption.

You get the picture. The upper Green is one of this region’s last pure and sacred wild places.

However, Canadian mining company Ascot Resources Ltd. has sought to develop a copper mine on U.S. Forest Service land in the Goat Mountain area of the watershed.   In 2018, it received federal permits to do exploratory drilling — not full fledged mining — on 900 acres of old mining claims it had acquired there.

The claims were excluded from the volcanic monument as a concession to the Reagan Administration when Congress established the 110,000-acre preserve in 1982. The claims skirt the monument’s northern boundary.

Conservation groups in 2022 won a court order to block Ascot from drilling, marking the second time the project has received a permitting setback.  I’ve never understood how federal agencies — in this case the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management — even CONSIDERED granting any mining-related permits in an area so ecologically and nationally significant.

With copper fetching high prices and growing demand for metal to wire America’s fleet of electric cars, Ascot is unlikely to give up easily.

Now, however, a state process might put the project down for the count. The state Department of Ecology is proposing to declare the upper river an “Outstanding Resource Water “ (ORW),  which would give the waterway the state’s highest level of protection.    

“We proposed designating the Green River based on its relatively pristine condition,”  its location in a protected area, its high water quality and unique recreational value, and “exceptional ecological significance,” Ecology announced in is proposal, made this past summer.

The Green River is 37 miles long, but the state is only seeking ORW protection for the upper 12 or so miles of the headwaters down to Miners Creek near the Cowlitz/Skamania County Line. Lands west of there are owned by Weyerhaeuser Co. and are not included in the state’s ORW proposal.

Under the state’s proposed designation, any new or expanded projects that would degrade water quality in the upper river would be prohibited.  Basically, the purpose is to protect water in a pristine condition. It’s hard to imagine a copper mine — most likely a strip mine — would pass such a strict level of scrutiny. 

The state has already held a public hearing and public comment period on its proposal and expects to make a decision about ORW status this winter.

Conservationists opposed to Ascot’s plans asked Ecology to seek the ORW  designation for the Green, which would give them a major weapon to oppose the project. 

Small-scale mining a century ago and other previous exploration did not discover rich mineral deposits in the area. And the remote location would make hauling ore expensive. Nevertheless, Ascot has held out prospects for thousands of jobs and an economic boom for eastern Lewis County should it ever develop the mine.

Right. I’ve always suspected that Ascot’s real strategy is to get the federal government, with taxpayer money, to pay it millions of dollars to buy out its mining claims rather than fight public opposition to a mine.  Presumably, it claims would be worth more if . Ascot can prove through exploratory drilling that mineral deposits are richer than historically believed. 

The conservation group Green River Valley Alliance on September 15 sent a letter to members of the Washington congressional designation asking for legislation to withdraw mining claims on about 46,000 acres of federal land near Goat and Strawberry mountain areas of the upper Green.

The group did not address how to handle or compensate Ascot’s financial interest in the mining claims. A spokeswoman for U.S. Bureau of Land Management said the agency can’t answer that question because it isn’t sure how Ascot’s claims could be affected by legislation or Ecology’s regulatory process.

No doubt the lawyers and land managers would have a field day digging into this one. Let them figure it out.  Better to dig through mounds of legal briefs and records than to trash one of the Southwest Washington’s most pristine waterways.