THE REMAKING OF PAINTED CREEK
I visit a stretch of Painted Creek every
year, as part of my job. I saw the results of the
accident first hand. And I witnessed what came after. A
little canyon creek in Arizona, Painted flows a tenuous
path from the Pinal Mountains up to just east of
Phoenix. Above the creek, over the cliffs, towers CMI
copper mine, dwarfed in its turn by mounds of tailings
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the depleted remnants of rocks crushed to release the
copper. These tailings are like talcum powder, fine,
slick and without many nutrients.
The tailings piles look like mesas. And
indeed, they have become the landscape, legacy of almost
a century of mining, the burden of the future for a
company whether copper is being produced or not. Here to
stay, they rise up, enervated yellow soil bleak with
exhaustion, while the rock canyon dives in a steep vee
to the small creek that graces the bottom.
There, the world alters. The canyon fills
with mesquite and cottonwood. In a desert land, these
places of water are havens. Wildflowers and wildlife
throng around the rare water
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as do humans, who hike in to savor the fragile canyon
world of this U.S. Forest Service property. Painted
Creek is unfortunate in its path through rich
copper-mining country, but fortunate in its protectors.
As part of CMI=s
agreement with EPA, we visit every year to conduct a
bioassessment of Painted Creek. |
