A fishy future in Dry Creek

When traveling around northern Nevada it’s not uncommon to see the bumper sticker: IF IT DOESN’T GROW, IT HAS TO BE MINED.  It’s probably the same thing in mining communities everywhere. And while it’s just a bumper sticker, it can be thought provoking. 

When you consider everything you use during the course of a day, it’s remarkable how much of it “doesn’t grow.” But on top of that, even the things that do grow require equipment and material that has to be mined. Mining is central to everything we have and do every day. 

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Quite often mining is only thought of as coal, gold and silver mining. But other materials, such as barite (which is used as a weighting agent for drilling fluids) have come on to the radar of conservation organizations.

Barite is produced through open-pit mining. When a pit mine is started, the target mineral is usually covered by soil and rock. This soil and rock, called overburden, needs to be removed to begin the actual mining. The problem is what to do with it.

About 50 miles northwest of the small town of Wells, in northeast Nevada, is an old pit mine located in the Snake Range mountains. At this particular mine, the overburden was dumped into a small wash next to the pit, effectively blocking the creek that flowed down that wash.

In fact, the creek goes underground at the point it reaches the overburden pile and re-appears just on the downstream side of it. That creek is called Dry Creek, but in actuality, it is a perennial creek that flows 27 miles to join up with Salmon Falls Creek which then flows into the Snake River, the Columbia and the Pacific Ocean. At one time, Salmon Falls Creek was not just an ironic name. There used to be salmon in northeastern Nevada. And while salmon no longer can make the journey to Dry Creek, it is still the home of redband trout. 

With support from The Tiffany and Co. Foundation, Orvis and the private landowner, TU is undertaking a project to reconnect the upper five miles of prime redband spawning habitat to the lower 22 miles of Dry Creek. This project will require the replacement of two road crossings that are acting as fish barriers along with the re-routing of the creek to avoid the overburden pile and allow fish passage through to the headwaters. Once completed, the resident population of redband trout in Dry Creek will have access to preferred spawning grounds that haven’t been available to the lower 22 miles of creek in over 40 years. 

Partnerships like those involved in the Dry Creek Project are necessary to remediate the impacts of a very necessary aspect of modern life.  If it doesn’t grow it has to be mined.  And the Dry Creek partnership works to make sure that the residual impacts of this mining don't last forever.