Dear Editor,

With appreciation to The Mountain-Ear for running well-researched articles on this area’s mining history, there is an additional dimension that I would like to see explored. After the old mining operations finished their extractions and closed up shop, they seem to have then literally walked away and left behind literal mountains of debris, some of it laced with cyanide and mercury and all of it an eyesore (at best).

As a fourth-generation Coloradoan whose roots here go back to at least 1885, I’ve always been curious as to the public cleanup aftermath following mining companies’ packing up and running away with their personal profits.

Challenge: Could we see some articles on the legacy of the mining operations, including the costs and difficulties that have had to be borne to remedy the leave-behinds? (FYI, my wife and I live in the townsite of Tungsten, where perhaps a million tons of mill piles were flattened out with bulldozers to make a meadow, decades ago.)

Frank Sanders

Nederland