Idaho's Clean Water Needs Your Help!

Issue

A Canadian mining company is proposing an open-pit cyanide heap leach mine in the headwaters of the South Fork of the Clearwater River. The Buffalo Gulch mine would be on Bureau of Land Management land just west of Elk City.

The Canadian mining company is using a flawed mine plan from the 1980s. Every major open-pit cyanide leach mine in Montana that used this same design ended up contaminating water supplies with cyanide or other toxins.

Main Points

• This project is a threat to one of Idaho's most precious resources: clean drinking water. The mine would be only a few hundred feet from local drinking water wells and tributaries to the South Fork of the Clearwater River, an important salmon and steelhead stream.
• If cyanide or diesel fuel were to leak into a stream or spill in a truck accident along the river, it could have devastating impacts on clean water and fisheries. The Bureau of Land Management must address transportation of hazardous chemicals.
• The mining company must update its outdated mine plan in response to recent accidents at other mines.

What You Can Do

Submit comments to the Bureau of Land Management! You can email your comments using the form below or send them to

Stephanie Connolly, Field Manager
Cottonwood Field Office
1 Butte Drive
Cottonwood, ID 83522-5200

For More Information

• Go to the Bureau of Land Management website to read about the Buffalo Gulch mining project.
• Contact John Robison at jrobison@wildidaho.org or 208.345.6933 x13.