New Californian Trend: Re-Opening Old Gold Mines

A report on this phenomenon made the New York Times. Initially confined to the opening of open-pit mines, the trend has made its way underground.

In addition to the Lincoln Mine, 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 owns the mine.

The Idaho-Maryland project is much 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 drills — 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.”

This trend has been long in coming. As the above excerpt hints at, the permitting process for re-opening a mine is a long one and fraught with uncertainty. There's also the problem of previous waste, which any company wanting to re-open a mine has to take responsibility for. Despite those obstacles, California gold production last year was higher than that for the year before.