Up Sucker Creek in southwest Oregon, gold miners' rights collide with environmental realities

[depakid]

Ron Gibson (left), vice president of the Southwest Oregon Mining Association, advises gold miner Cliff Tracy (right) on mining law. "The miners are not out there on a whim and trespassing on the public domain," Gibson says. "Once you file a mineral claim it becomes private property and that's what Congress intended."
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At 38 years old, clean shaven and well spoken, Clifford R. Tracy doesn't fit Hollywood's archetype of a wild-eyed and white-bearded gold miner.

But Tracy is Oregon's top gold mining rogue to environmentalists -- and a champion for a contingent of gold miners who say regulators are trampling their long-held property rights.

Last year, Tracy was convicted of illegal mining along Sucker Creek on U.S. Forest Service property in southwest Oregon, after he felled trees, dug mining pits and diverted a stream without permission. He spent 13 days in jail because he wouldn't agree to stop mining. In Jackson County jail he went on a hunger strike, the jail confirms, and says he lost 20 pounds." It wasn't that bad," Tracy says. "The food wasn't that great anyway."

Now Tracy has applied to mine just downstream on Bureau of Land Management property next to the creek, which happens to be one of Oregon's top streams for wild coastal coho, listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

The showdown on Sucker Creek comes downs to a conflict between the General Mining Law of 1872, which helped settle the West by promising easy access to minerals, and modern environmental laws such as the Endangered Species Act, adopted 101 years later.

It also spotlights the controversial roles of federal agencies that manage public lands.

Environmentalists and state regulators criticize the BLM, saying it's too lax with miners and is ignoring Tracy's conviction and prior problems on BLM mining projects. Tracy criticizes the Forest Service, saying it dragged out his small-scale project for 13 years. He has appealed his conviction and says he's eager to fight mining restrictions and "asinine" claims of environmental damage.

He also says it's his right to mine the BLM site, no matter what regulators say.

"I'm going to be mining there before this year's out," he says. "I guarantee you that."

More: http://www.oregonlive.com/environment/index.ssf/2010/06/up_sucker_creek_in_southwest_o.html

Sounds like someone who needs to be kept behind bar for whole lot longer.

[tularetom]

1. The real problem will be when miners rights collide with "growers"

Mr Tracy is liable to wish his ass was back in jail.

Those guys do not fuck around and you know there has to be a shitload of them out there in the woods.

[bemildred]

2. Those plants behind those two guys, in the picture, have funny looking leaves ... nt