Roger Baker, Gilpin County Manager.  A couple of very sad news reports in the last few weeks illustrate how difficult the mixed-use legacy of our Colorado mountains can be, and how well the Gilpin County Commissioners have tried (despite having very limited powers in most of these areas) to cope with these difficulties.

The death on July 3 of a sixty-year-old man in the Pike National Forest from an accidental gunshot brought to light the problem of lightly regulated shooting in our national forests.

Certainly that has been an issue in Gilpin County, too, though we’ve been spared that kind of tragedy.

The Commissioners have teamed with their colleagues in Larimer, Boulder, and Clear Creek counties to work with the Forest Service (and Bureau of Land Management, Colorado Parks and Wildlife, and other landowners) to try to identify sites that could be used for a shooting range.

The hope, of course, is that if enough convenient shooting ranges are opened in or near the Front Range, the Forest Service can close large sections of the Arapahoe/Roosevelt National Forest to “dispersed” shooting.

That’s not a universally popular idea on its face, however, and it will become even less popular (at least with some) as the group focuses in on specific sites.

In response to the concerns of many, the Forest Services has extended the “scoping” comment period for the plan—which identifies goals and objectives, as well as suitable and unsuitable sites—to September 3. There will be three open houses for the public to weigh in on the plan, and two are in our neck of the woods: Monday, August 31, from 5 to 7 p.m. at the Community Center in Nederland; and Tuesday, September 1, at the Clear Creek Middle School on Highway 103 in Idaho Springs (same hours).

More recently, Coloradans were horrified to see the pictures of the Animas River near Durango turned orange by a mine water blowout from the Gold King mine near Silverton, a discharge ironically caused by contractors working with the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

The EPA was already in some disrepute in certain circles, criticized from the right for overreach and the left for inaction in dealing with climate change and other hugely complicated issues, and this won’t add to the agency’s reputation for competence.

Still, staff in Gilpin County has worked with the EPA, Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) and other agencies on a number of projects to minimize the harmful discharges from some of the old mines and millsites in Gilpin County.

The agencies just completed a large mitigation project in Russell Gulch, on the old Pittsburgh mine, and of course everyone coming into Central City on the parkway has seen the work done on the old tailings pile above the Big-T parking lot.

Now the County (and the two cities) are working with EPA and CDPHE to construct a water treatment plant below Black Hawk solely for the purpose of treating contaminated mine water that continues to flow into North Clear Creek. It’s tricky, because it calls for a level of water to be maintained in the creek that  will be hard to sustain if the various jurisdictions use the water rights they already have.

While we have had blowouts like the one down south, they have been much smaller in scale; but just as the news reports are now focusing on the ongoing problems down there (540 gallons of acid drainage per MINUTE flowing into the headwaters of the Animas), they help call attention to the ongoing mine remediation problems in all of Colorado’s historic mining counties.

And there’s nowhere more historic than Gilpin County….