Coal cleanup gets under way at Smith Hill Mine

Work to last until the snow flies

After more than a century of ecological unrest in the Slate River Valley, one more abandoned coalmine is being reclaimed by the world that was once there, slowly and not without a little help from its friends.

The Crested Butte Land Trust (CBLT) has teamed up again with the Colorado Division of Reclamation Mining and Safety (CDRMS) to take on a process to return to its former condition what’s become known as the Smith Hill Mine, on the Trust’s 120-acrs Gunsight Bridge parcel.
If you ride out Slate River Road to the Gunsight Pass parking area, you can see where the process starts, with machines and men, just like the last major change to the landscape a hundred years ago.
The CBLT has worked with CDRMS before. The two groups paired up on the Peanut Mine reclamation project on the opposite side of the Slate River drainage. The project earned a National Award for Excellence from the U.S. Department of the Interior in 2008.
CBLT executive director Ann Johnston says, “After that project we knew that CDRMS had money to clean up coal waste. And we felt they were a really good partner.” Then it took the Land Trust about five years from the time it started talking with the state about the coal that had been left in the wetlands around the Slate River to get all the parts of the project working together.
The coal that is there was left from a couple of mining operations in the area that started with the Anthracite Mesa Mine, operated by Colorado Fuel & Iron Company between 1884 and 1906. According to information from the CBLT, the mine started operations again in 1914 as the Crested Butte Anthracite Mining Company and maintained production until 1929.
In that time, nearly 1.3 million tons of coal came out of Smith Hill. At one time a company town called Cloud City, complete with as many as 15 houses, occupied a site 800 feet above Slate River Road. Today Cloud City is private property and isn’t accessible to the public, but high on the ridge a few log structures still stand.
In 2003, the Crested Butte Land Trust bought the Gunsight property and a vision emerged of someday restoring the area to its natural state, plus adding to the more than 1,000 acres the Land Trust holds in the Slate River Valley.
Today, like the ghosts of myriad staked claims scattered throughout the mountains, the skeletal remains of the mine—giant pieces of ancient machinery and heavy cables—lie rusted and decaying, half buried in the black earth.
Vic Hansen is working to reshape the river bottom, shovel in hand, while an off-road dump truck pulls into the parking lot. He’s been working at a T-post driven deep in the ground, when he stops to admire the view up Oh Be Joyful and to Paradise.
“We love doing these,” Hansen says of the reclamation, “and it seems like people are appreciative.” He says McCollum’s Excavating, the crew contracted to do the coal removal, has done its share of clean-up at abandoned mines, even helping fight a coal fire smoldering near Trinidad last year. The last reclamation project he worked on, he says, was on James Pass.
Similar to what was done on that job, the work that needs to be done high on Smith Hill can’t be done with machines or heavy equipment. Instead it will take work with hand tools and a four-man crew to cut in space to plant vegetation.
“We’re going to try to stay away from the terraced look, with lines running across the hill,” Hansen said.
Some of the work to reclaim the Smith Hill Mine will be done by helicopter, to reduce the impact to the watershed.
But first the crew is cutting a horseshoe-shaped road into the valley before “pulling it up as we come back,” says equipment operator Brady Kutscher. As the vegetation is sheared away, the coal will come to the surface and removal can begin.
The willows and native vegetation that is pulled up from the excavated area will be saved for later replanting in the reclaimed areas. The coal, which Kutscher says varies in thickness from six inches to three feet and runs in “fingers” from the hill into the valley, won’t go far either.
“If you take coal away from one area and dump it in another, you’re just moving the problem; you’re not fixing anything,” Johnston says. “And the coal in our area isn’t as damaging as, say, some coal from the East Coast that releases toxicity into the environment. The real problem that comes from our coal is that it creates so much sediment.”
The sediment finds its way into the wetlands and chokes out native plants and changes the environment from the ground up, Johnston says, adding that the coal tailings are “filling [the wetlands] up with a big clog, but it’s not releasing dangerous contaminants.”
So the plan is to move the coal from the flats to the base of the hill around the area where the parking lot is now, lined with “geogrid netting,” Kutscher says, to keep the sediment secured. Coal about three feet deep will be used as a fill and covered with topsoil before the area is re-vegetated.
Johnston says, “CDRMS has had really good luck putting a little topsoil down and re-vegetating the coal.” Throughout the site it’s clear the coal isn’t killing any plants. Native or not, the flora of the Slate River valley has learned to live with the environment it’s been given.
So a lot of those grasses will have to go and the replanting is expected to last “until the snow flies,” Hansen says.
Johnson hopes so. She says the site will come back best if the plants are put in the ground and promptly covered by snow until spring. And until the plants come back, the reclamation site will be closed to the public, while the Gunsight Bridge stays open.
Johnson hopes people remember, “With reclamation projects, they always look worse before they get better.”