FEATURE COVERAGE

It’s a RAP
The Battle over Idarado’s Reclamation

by Samantha Tisdel Wright

Locals called it the Toxic Twinkie.

By the time the Idarado mine shut down in 1978, the enormous loaf-shaped mound of tailings at the edge of Telluride – otherwise known as the Number 6 tailings pile – had taken on a life of its own in the town’s collective consciousness.  

On gusty days, 20-foot-tall dust devils lifted off the tailings and swept through town, inspiring KOTO (Telluride’s local radio station) to broadcast “tailings alerts” warning town residents to take cover. No one really knew what was in that dust, or what it might do to them when they breathed it in.

Some folks joked (and perhaps secretly fantasized) that the Toxic Twinkie would roll out of town one day of its own accord, like a giant jellyroll filled with slime.

Miles of Tunnels

by Samantha Tisdel Wright

A Brief History of the Idarado Mine

The history of the Idarado Mine is as long the tunnels and as rich as the ore veins that riddle its guts. Its stories are stoked by volcanic tantrums, and sculpted by the winds of history that blew Americans across the West.

How far back do you want to go – World War II? Manifest Destiny of the 1800s? Dominguez and Escalante in 1776? The Tertiary period 35 million years ago, with its great belching supervolcanoes and collapsed calderas that spawned the fabled ore bodies of the San Juan Mountains?

All had a role to play in the rise of the largest mining operation that ever existed in the San Juans.

The Big Bonanza

By Sue Hirshman
with Kent Nelson

A bird that is called a nomad
 with beaks of each type
  adapted to fit the cones
  of specific conifers
          —anonymous—

by Mary Menz
news@ouraynews.com

Water from Colorado serves 19 states, and Colorado’s population alone is expected to nearly double from 4.3 million (2000) to 7.2 million in 2030. With 80 percent of the water supply coming from snowfall, it makes sense that today’s watershed scientists are looking to better manage and estimate water supplies that drain from the mountains.
That’s what native Coloradan Abby Eurich is doing. Eurich is a graduate student at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, but the work she’s doing for her master’s degree in...