The Animas is fishing well these days

On Aug. 5, 2015, the Gold King mine near Silverton, Colo., unleashed 3 million gallons of mine wastewater into the upper Animas River. Within hours, the plume had traveled downstream to Durango – right in the middle of a busy summer in a tourism-based town. The striking pictures of the orange plume spread across the globe in minutes. The media coverage was massive and the world took note. Lost among the “Orange River” pictures, the apocalyptic commentary with words like disaster, catastrophic, etc., and the hyperbolic ventilating about the impact to the fishery has been the good news: the Animas River has weathered the spill and the fishery through the town of Durango and continuing downstream through the Southern Ute Tribal waters is doing well.

The Animas is back to its usual state of water quality. As to the fishery, there has been no fish mortality documented from the spill, while bug sampling by an aquatic biologist with Mountain Studies Institute indicates a still thriving population of mayfly nymphs and caddis pupa.

“Rivers are wonderfully resilient,” says Ty Churchwell, San Juan Mountains coordinator for TU’s Sportsmen’s Conservation Project. “We can be thankful for that. The river is alive and well and fishing just great.”

The need for cleanup of abandoned mines throughout the West remains. As Trout Unlimited CEO Chris Wood recently said in testimony before the House Natural Resources Committee’s Energy and Mineral Resources Subcommittee  “The 3 million gallon spill in August of polluted water from the Gold King mine near Silverton, Colo., drew national media attention. Outside the media spotlight, thousands of smaller scale abandoned mines are polluting our rivers and streams every day. The lesson from Gold King is not that an EPA contractor screwed up, it is that we need a much greater sense of urgency about addressing the problem of pollution from abandoned mines all over the nation.”

So if you were planning to fish the Animas and all the great waters near Durango, come on. There’s snow falling in the high country and that snow means great fishing in 2016. But before you come, how about sending a note to your Congressman and asking him or her to support the cleanup of abandoned mines? It just seems like the right thing to do.