Company wants to mine underneath wilderness area

NOXON, Mont. -- Mary Mitchell was hiking in the rugged Cabinet Mountains in 1995 when she came upon the last thing she expected to see in one of the nation's oldest protected wilderness areas.

It was a small metal plate attached to a rock, indicating the location of an underground mining claim.

Like many people, Mitchell believed wilderness areas are off-limits to development. But she soon learned that a mining company intends to bore two three-mile tunnels underneath the Cabinets to reach a giant vein of silver and copper.

Alarmed, Mitchell joined the Rock Creek Alliance and has spent the past six years trying to stop the proposed Rock Creek Mine near the Montana-Idaho state line.

The fight is not going well for mine opponents, among them singers Bonnie Raitt and Jackson Browne, who have given concerts to raise money to stop the project.

The day after Christmas, the U.S. Forest Service and the state of Montana issued permits allowing Sterling Mining Co. of Spokane, Wash., to begin exploratory work.

That decision, 14 years after the project was first proposed, alarmed environmental and business interests who fear the mine will pollute the water, imperil grizzly bears and other wildlife, and drive off tourists who enjoy the region's spectacularly beautiful lakes and trout streams.

"Most people live here because it is wild and there are elk on the hillsides and very few people," said Judy Hutchins, who grows hay and trees in nearby Heron, Mont. She called the mine "an abomination."

The Cabinet Mountains are one of only four places in the Lower 48 states where grizzly bears -- an endangered species -- are known to live.

The beauty of the soaring peaks was recognized as early as 1907, when President Theodore Roosevelt made the Cabinets a forest reserve. Later, they became one of the first areas protected under the Wilderness Act of 1964.

However, the Wilderness Act also allows owners of mining claims inside protected areas to extract the minerals.

This is not the first time the government has given the OK to mine underneath protected wilderness. But this is easily among the biggest such projects ever proposed, involving one of the largest undeveloped ore deposits in the United States.

Sterling and the state contend hikers and campers in the wilderness will not even know a mine is operating hundreds of feet beneath them.