Hard-rock mining banned

MOAB — Interior Secretary Gale Norton picnicked near Moab among dignitaries and demonstrators Saturday as she signed an order prohibiting new hard-rock mining along 192 miles of the Colorado, Green and Dolores rivers.

"The first time I came through this canyon I was shortly out of law school," Norton said as she opened her speech. "One thing that stands out in my mind from that trip is this canyon. When I heard we were offering protection here, I personally wanted to be a part of it."

The public land order has been on the drawing board of the Utah Bureau of Land Management office since 1999. It was made public in 2000, and hearings were held on the proposed withdrawal and management plan amendments in 2001. In April 2003 State BLM Director Sally Wisely signed off on the plan. This week the order becomes a federal mandate.

The order seeks to protect 52 miles of the Colorado River from the end of Westwater Canyon to the boundary of Canyonlands National Park by prohibiting new surface mining leases for the next 20 years. Also included are 20 miles of the Dolores River from the Utah/Colorado border to the confluence with the Colorado River, and a 120-mile stretch of the Green River that ends at the boundary of Canyonlands National Park.

The combined areas include popular river-running areas, including the Moab Daily, the Stateline Rapid, and Desolation, Gray and Labyrinth Canyons.

Wisely said it has been 50 years since a commercial hard-rock mining claim has operated along these corridors, but there are currently 101 placer claims and two lode claims in those areas. Existing claims will be unaffected by the order, she said. Most of these are held by one-person operations, or inactive.

The ceremony included more than a dozen invited guests and a couple of dozen "uninvited guests," who staged a protest of what organizers called a "Greenwash" in a pullout across U-128 from the Big Bend camping area. The larger issue, according to a coalition of environmental groups collectively known as the Redrock Heritage Coalition, is a BLM lease sale held on Sept. 8 that opens some of these very same rivers to development of gas and oil.

Wisely confirmed there are seven gas and oil development parcels that cross boundaries with the protected area but said the BLM's Gas and Oil Division operates under a different authority than the Surface Mining Division. And with those sales, stipulations were included to protect the river corridors.