June 1, 2006

Fortunately, a year-round parade of insects means there is always an opportunity to catch the South Fork's beefy rainbows on a fly. "The giant stoneflies in late spring get the big fish and the drift-boaters excited," says Caldwell angler Chris Topmiller. "Caddis hatches that start in June and hatches of Pink Albert mayflies in August give you another shot at big fish on dry flies. Then in late summer and fall, hoppers, flavs, and craneflies show up, and the caddis can be like clockwork on some stretches of the river. When nothing else works, big stonefly nymphs are the go-to fly, or you can throw streamers and try to get into one of the South Fork's really big fish."

The Middle Fork Boise River (above) is threatened by a cyanide heap leach mine. The gold mine has a life expectancy of five to seven years, but the effects of the mine--including toxic leakage from the mine site or truck spills on the road to and from the mine could last forever.

The same river system also has small mountain streams with lots of fish that rise to Royal Wulffs (or, if things get really tricky, Parachute Adams). The North Fork Boise and hundreds of tributary streams offer just that. "There are all kinds of places where you can spend all day throwing just about any fly and catch fish. The smaller tributaries tend to have more native trout, and in some of those streams, the bull trout are so thick you can't even keep them away from a dry fly," according to Boise angler Mike McDonagh who has been fishing the river system for over 30 years.

The Middle Fork offers something exactly in between. "On most summer days just about any dry fly will do so long as its big, juicy and attracts attention," says McDonagh. "Once in a while, though, the fish will pick a bug and stay with it, and your fly better look something like that bug, but an exact match is almost never necessary."

A Long History of Mining

The Boise has long been seen as a resource for local development. The river and its tributaries have been panned and dredged for silver and gold since at least 1864, leaving miles of the Middle Fork, North Fork, More's Creek, and other tributary streams scarred by dredging, placer, and hardrock mining.

The water itself turned out to provide a far more lasting treasure for the Treasure Valley. Early efforts to dam and divert the river for crop irrigation were vividly recounted in Wallace Stegner's epic novel "Angle of Repose." The Army Corps of Engineers tried to harness the river early in the 20th Century, buildling a series of large dams, while dozens of small diversions turn water from the river into an equal number of irrigation canals which spread water across the once-arid Treasure Valley.

Despite these numerous insults to the river, the Boise has remained remarkably healthy and still provides superb habitat for native redband, bull, and cutthroat trout, as well as introduced brook trout and Arctic grayling. A new challenge to the river may be one it cannot easily survive. Atlanta Gold Company, a Canadian firm with funding from a variety of foreign sources, wants to construct an open-pit cyanide heap leach mine a few miles from the town of Atlanta. Ultimately, over 27 million tons of waste rock would be generated by the operation, and dumped into two valleys on the mine site, while the ore-bearing rock would be doused with a cyanide solution in two massive leach pads covering acres of mountain top.

 

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"The city of Boise gets 20 percent of its drinking water from the Boise River, and tens of thousands of people in the Treasure Valley float, fish, or swim in the Boise River. Those are the people at risk if there is a diesel or cyanide spill," says Dr. Perry Brown a Boise pediatrician who also fly fishes in the Boise.

"Every single claim to a 'state of the art' cyanide heap leach mine in the last 20 years has proven to be wrong; every single one of these mines has failed and polluted. The only reason that this mine has not yet done so is that it has not yet been built," says Dr. Brown. "I know that the chemicals that Atlanta Gold risks spilling or leaking would be devastating. Cyanide, diesel fuel, arsenic, mercury, or lead, would do untold harm to the local ecosystem, could result in a massive fish and wildlife kill, and may threaten the water Boiseans drink," he concludes.

Fishing on the Middle Fork Boise River (above) isn't as difficult as on the South Fork, and the trout are larger than those in the smaller tributaries. It's a place where you can have whole sections of river to yourself and catch trout on Trudes and Parachute Adams.

But the use of massive amounts of cyanide and diesel fuel, and the tailings piles which will almost certainly leak arsenic, mercury, and heavy metals in the headwaters of the Boise River is not the only problem with the proposal. Just as significant is the problem of getting the materials to the mine site. Atlanta sits at the end of 60 miles of twisted, washboard dirt road barely maintained by the Forest Service and the Atlanta Highway District, a public agency serving and funded by the few hundred land-owners of the town of Atlanta. Taking this narrow, twisting, dirt road will be 611 tankers of diesel fuel, 37 deliveries of sodium cyanide, 50 of ammonium nitrate explosives, twenty-five 2,000-pound propane tanks, 370 cement trucks, and 416 busloads of workers each year for the life of the mine according to Atlanta Gold's Transportation Plan.

In public meetings held in Boise in recent months, numerous Atlanta residents have recounted the difficulties of travelling these roads even in four-wheel drive trucks and SUVs. The road to Atlanta washed out in May 2006 and was closed for at least 10 days, an event that is nearly annual for Atlanta residents and anglers. The difficulties of keeping diesel tankers and truckloads of chemicals on those same roads seems insurmountable to many of those who know the road, "It's no place for big trucks full of dangerous chemicals, one of them is going to end up in the river" says local angler McDonagh.

Challenges Met?

Fortunately, sportsmen, conservation organizations, and the public will have a chance to weigh in on this plan before it is approved. Idaho Trout Unlimited (www.idahotu.org) has been actively educating the public about the threats posed by the mine to the river, wildlife, and people downstream of the mine site, as has been Idaho Families for Clean Water, a coalition formed by environmental groups. The USDA Forest Service is accepting public comments as part of a scoping period in advance of preparing a draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). The public can review the entire mine proposal and submit comments electronically at www.atlantagoldeis.com. The period for submitting scoping comments ends June 9, 2006, but the Forest Service will accept comments throughout the EIS process.

Efforts to restore the already damaged portions of the river system are also bearing fruit. On More's Creek near Idaho City, the USDA Forest Service, with financial and in-kind support from a variety of conservation organizations, will begin to fix the damage caused by gold dredging in the last century. With the hiring of Boise Watershed Restoration Coordinator Pam Smolczynski, Trout Unlimited will be in a position to assist with that work as well as to clean up mine wastes and prevent them from reaching the Middle Fork Boise at the former Monarch Mine near Atlanta. "Cleaning up abandoned mines might be the single-most, least addressed environmental challenge in the nation" says TU's Brian O'Donnell, and TU's Smolczynski will be leading those efforts in the Boise watershed.

In the Boise River near the city of Boise, efforts to improve the fishery are also under way. In July, 2005, Idaho Fish and Game and the Ted Trueblood Chatper of TU placed spawning-sized gravel in two side channels near Boise's Greenbelt. Both channels were used in the fall and spring by spawning brown and rainbow trout respectively. A consortium of individuals, real estate developers, private foundations, public agencies and anglers has come together to support the creation of a new side channel near the Harris Ranch development which will mimic naturally occurring stream braiding and channeling to further increase the available spawning and rearing habitat for wild trout in the Boise. All of these projects could end up useless if the River is poisoned with cyanide, arsenic or diesel fuel.

Dr. Perry sums up his concerns, "We risk losing a precious and unique jewel in Idaho's crown if this mine is built. And if we lose this jewel it is never coming back."