A Canadian mining company has acquired rights to mine within original boundaries of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument/Colter Hoyt
A hard rock mine that shut down when President Clinton established the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah in 1996 could soon be back in operation, as President Trump's realignment of the monument places the mine outside its boundaries and a Canadian-based mining company has purchased the rights to it.
The Colt Mesa mine has deposits of copper and cobalt, along with zinc, nickel, and molybdenum. Glacier Lake Resources, Inc., based in Vancouver, British Columbia, earlier this month announced that it had acquired the property that is not far from Boulder, Utah.
"The Colt Mesa acquisition broadens our focus on sedimentary hosted copper deposits, with a significant bonus of cobalt and nickel mineralization indicated. There is strong investor interest in the 'Battery Metals' sector, including cobalt, nickel and copper," said Saf Dhillon, president and chief executive officer. "Surface exploration work will start this summer on the Colt Mesa property and drill permitting will be initiated shortly.”
But whether President Trump's revised boundaries for the national monument hold up in court remains to be seen, and outside groups already are lining up to challenge Glacier Lake's move.
The Conservation Lands Foundation, Grand Staircase Escalante Partners, and Society for Vertebrate Paleontology have announced they’re evaluating any and all remedies to stop the mine from resuming operations. According to the three, the area "supports a delicate desert ecosystem and a landscape enclosed in cliff walls, rich in Triassic era fossil deposits, which is unique and was included in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument to protect it from disturbance by mining."
“Colt Mesa should be off limits for mining. As far as we and legal scholars are concerned, this land is still part of the national monument until the legal challenge to President Trump’s proclamation last December removing nearly a million acres is decided,” said Nicole Croft, executive director of Grand Staircase Escalante Partners. “Glacier Lake Resources claim is on land that was acquired by Congress from the State of Utah in 1998 for Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument. Utah traded the land for thousands of acres of valuable mineral lands elsewhere in the state as well as a sum of $50 million. It’s pure industrial greed at the expense of our community’s economic and cultural heritage.”
Brian Sybert, executive director of Conservation Lands Foundation, added that,"(I)t appears that the Department of Interior is focused on exploitation of national public lands without regard to the fundamental underlying and unresolved questions concerning the legality of the Trump proclamation, which is now before the court. Expediting damaging actions on sensitive lands that were in the monument appears to be a tactic by the administration to make an 'end run' around the judicial process.”
The Conservation Lands Foundation, Grand Staircase-Escalante Partners, and the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology filed suit in federal court in December to overturn President Trump’s proclamation dismantling Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and carving it into small pieces representing about half of the area protected by the original, 21-year-old national monument.
Comments
Yes Heather there are plenty of things the President hasn't ruined, in fact quite the opposite. The economy, employment, unemployment, wages, Korea, Israel, the lives of Korean prisoners, the military, tax payers, border security, the VA, consumer confidence ..... and the list goes on and on www.magapill.com
I can see it's time for another history lesson. The point of the purchase is extortion. I doubt anyone intends to mine a thing other than the Federal Treasury. Remember Yellowstone (see the link).
https://www.nytimes.com/1995/12/10/opinion/canceling-the-new-world-mine....
As for President Trump's "complicity," the list of American presidents (and governors) behind these land grabs includes as many Democrats as Republicans.
Of all the rats being thrown into the sausage of American politics, those corrupting the public lands are the least understood. If you want to save the national landscape, good luck. Neither party has ever wanted to save it properly, which is to explain why Grand Staircase ran afoul of politics. Would Hillary Clinton have reduced the monument? Probably not. But don't count on it when the chips are down for any resource deemed essential for the national interest. Only the end of World War II stopped Olympic National Park from being logged, for example--and still the superintendent went out and logged it.
Ah, the facts. How we hate them so. . .
Olympic Battleground: Creating and Defending Olympic National Park, 2nd Edition
"A Shocking revelation . . . . No one vitally interested in the past, present, or future of the national parks can afford to ignore this work of historical dynamite.
This is the first comprehensive history of Olympic National Park
A case study of the need for citizen action to protect our natural areas
As a seasonal ranger in Olympic National Park early in his career, Carsten Lien discovered the shocking truth. Flouting the law, and contrary to public expectation, the National Park Service was logging the very land it was supposed to preserve. Lien vowed to uncover the story behind the destruction. In Olympic Battleground, Lien documents more than one hundred years of political chicanery, citizen activism, bureaucratic failure, and the loss of primeval forest. This classic in historical investigation is now updated with a new chapter on the most recent preservation challenges confronting the park.
5.0 out of 5 starsAn astounding history of Olympic National Park
October 17, 2007
Format: Paperback|Verified Purchase
This book provides an incredible example of an agency failing to follow its own mandate as well as ignoring the will of the public. For several decades, the National Park Service (NPS) not only allowed, but encouraged, loggers to cut down old-growth forest inside Olympic National Park. It also fought to reduce the boundaries of that park to increase the amount of timber available to the local logging industry. Even when found out, important people in the NPS remained determined to cut down the old-growth timber in the park wherever it thought local sawmills would benefit, and on any land that the NPS didn't want in the first place.
When I had first heard this story, it was presented as a couple of loose cannons getting away with tree murder. However, Lien's book provides so many smoking guns - - or should I say, "smoking chainsaws" - - that there is an obvious policy problem here.
Lien's ultimate explanation of this history remains somewhat unsatisfactory to me. He argues that the NPS has a weak management culture and unclear mandate (both true) and that it is also eager to compromise with anyone who makes demands on it - - including loggers looking for old-growth timber. I'm not sure that wimpy acquiescence is the dominant NPS norm, since it does resist certain types of demands, such as those of horse outfitters, hunters, and in some parks, mountaineers. The case of hunters is particularly interesting, since elk hunting in Yellowstone and Rocky Mountain, bison hunting in Yellowstone, and deer hunting in many eastern battlefield parks would solve a number of other policy problems, and there *is* public demand for such hunting. So, the NPS doesn't simply acquiesce to everybody, and that part of Lien's argument can't be right.
Lien grounds this story in a brief history of the U.S. Forest Service and the NPS, and how Pinchot's "conservation" eventually alienated preservationists such as John Muir and public opinion more generally. These chapters provide, at best, an unconventional history of the USFS and NPS in the Progressive era. I think Lien overstates the preservationist element of public opinion, and is too eager to see preservationism even among the elites of the Theodore Roosevelt era.
Criticisms aside, this is one of the most remarkable national park histories out there."
Al--
I think you're right on the extortion angle. I remember the guy who purchased inholdings in Black Canyon / Curecanti and threatened to build mansions on the ridgetop if he didn't get bought out at inflated prices. The oil exploration in Big Cypress is much more about getting NPS/DOI to buy up the mineral rights at inflated prices than it it about perhaps pumping a few hundred barrels of oil per day. Unfortunately, as exemplified by the seismic survey damage in Big Cypress, a lot of damage can be done to ratchet up the stakes in the extortion.
The downside to electric vehicles, wind tubines and solar power that no one wants to talk about.
WHY ARE WE GIVING OUR NATURAL RESOURCES AWAY TO A CANADIAN CO WE ARE IN TRADE TIFF WITH IN THE UTAH MINING
FIASCO SMELS LIKE ANOTHER ZINKE SCAM