Australian mining company touts Blackfoot gold mine as “flagship”
Laura Lundquist
(Missoula Current) Fans of the Blackfoot River are concerned about an Australian mining company’s renewed interest in gold deposits in the mountains southeast of Lincoln.
On Friday, the Montana Department of Environmental Quality released a draft environmental assessment of a second round of mineral exploration of the Columbia Gold Project on a private inholding on the Lewis and Clark National Forest. Great Plains Mining LCC, a subsidiary of Australia-based Sentinel Metals, filed an amendment to its exploration license on Jan. 26 to allow for additional exploration this spring.
DEQ is accepting public comment on the environmental assessment until April 13. Comments can be emailed to deqmepa@mt.gov or mailed to Field Services and Technology Section - Mining Bureau, Montana Department of Environmental Quality, 2401 Colonial Drive, Helena, MT 59601.
The exploration would involve drilling up to 21 separate bore holes to a maximum depth of almost 2,300 feet. The cores would be transported to Lincoln where they’d be cleaned and then sections would be sent to a laboratory for chemical analysis. Water used to cool the drill bit - up to 1,000 gallons a day - would be trucked from a domestic well on property just west of Lincoln. The exploration is expected to last six to eight weeks and the mining company said it would be completed by May 1 and reclamation would be complete by Sept. 1.
The property, owned mostly by Great Plains Mining, is about 3 miles south of Highway 200 and contains three old mine sites: the Columbia, Rover and Seven Up Pete mines. Seven Up Pete Creek flows along its southwestern border and a small tributary on its northern side feeds into Hogum Creek. Both creeks flow into the Blackfoot River.
Those tributaries and the mining project’s proximity to the Blackfoot River caught the attention of Montana Trout Unlimited. Coincidentally, the project is about 9 miles southwest of the former Mike Horse Mine, which was responsible for damaging the Blackfoot River fishery for decades.
An earthen dam built in 1941 to contain the Mike Horse mine tailings gave out in 1975, sending heavy metals, including zinc and cadmium, flooding into the upper Blackfoot River, wiping out the macroinvertebrate populations that trout feed on. More than $100 million has been spent restoring stream channels and floodplains and a water treatment plant was built to treat the contaminated mine water in perpetuity.
Anglers say the Blackfoot River fishery has never fully recovered. Montana Trout Unlimited said in a social media post that it was monitoring the situation closely.
“Here we go again. An Australian mining company is looking to "explore" a potential gold mine in the Blackfoot River headwaters. Because of past mining, ‘A River Runs Through It’ had to be filmed on the Gallatin (River) back in the ‘90s. It took 30+years of hard work, but Blackfoot is one of the biggest river restoration success stories in the country, driven by local landowners and sound stewardship. It's more precious than gold.”
Outdoors writer Hal Herring of Montana Backcountry Hunter and Anglers pointed out that, under the General Mining Act of 1872, the US won't get a penny of the money for the gold. Instead, it will be funneled to mining execs down-under and their shareholders.
“There won't be a half billion dollars to clean it all up next time,” Herring said in a social media post. “There won't be another second chance, another chance to do it right or conserve it and protect it for generations to come. We'll settle for our 30 pieces of lead gilded with fake silver, and we'll be remembered as the generations of Americans who had it all, and then let it be taken from us and those who follow us.”
The Columbia Gold Project has its own history, according to DEQ’s environmental assessment. After gold lode deposits were discovered in Seven-Up-Pete Gulch, the Columbia, Rover and Last Chance mines were developed and produced 12 tons of ore over a decade around the turn of the 20th century.
After Western Energy Company conducted some drilling until the 1980s, Canyon Resources Corp. took over the exploration license and conducted exploration activities until 2015, when it and other companies went bankrupt. Great Prairie Mining acquired the project in 2016 and has done some exploration drilling and trenching.
The Columbia Project is perched on 430 private acres, 277 owned by Great Prairie Mining and four other parcels owned by others. Since it’s private land, similar to the Black Butte Mine near White Sulphur Springs, the only limits on its development would be Montana’s mining regulations.
And now, it looks like more than just exploration will take place on the Columbia Project. Sentinel Metals is a new mining company that debuted on the Australian stock market on Oct. 30 under the leadership of former Rio Tinto executive Matt Herbert. It raised $10 million in its initial offering after Herbert said Sentinel was poised “to develop a new large-scale gold project in North America.”
On its homepage, Sentinel touts the Columbia Project as its flagship gold project, saying Montana “a great place to do business” because “Montana offers a compelling setting for new mine development, supported by a stable regulatory environment and strong infrastructure.”
“Located in the heart of one of the world’s most exciting emerging gold districts, the Columbia Project offers a compelling combination of a large existing resource, simple geology and exceptional exploration upside –providing a strong foundation for growth. With drilling and technical studies set to commence immediately, we are focused on expanding and upgrading the resource and progressing the project rapidly towards development,” Herbert said in an October statement.
As part of that regulatory environment, Sentinel Metals highlighted that it had hired Krista Lee Evans as its Vice President of Government and Community Relations, which “strengthens critical areas of community, government and regulatory engagement for the Columbia Gold Project.” Evans has been a long-time spokeswoman and organizer for several Montana agricultural organizations, including the Associate of Gallatin Agricultural Irrigators, the Senior Water Rights Coalition and the Montana Agricultural Business Association.
Past drilling on the Columbia Project has probed only to around 720 feet below the surface. Based upon recent results, Sentinel has targets to test to almost 2,300 feet deep in its upcoming diamond drill program, according to Resources Rising Stars.
“There’s so much depth potential. We expect this thing to coalesce at depth,” Herbert told Resources Rising Stars in December.
In the past, gold mining was usually done using heap and vat cyanide leach processing. But after the Pegasus Mine contaminated the water near Fort Belknap and the mining company declared bankruptcy before completing reclamation, the citizens of Montana passed a ballot initiative in 1998 that banned heap and vat cyanide leach processing. There have been attempts in the Montana Legislature since then to reverse the ban but so far, they’ve failed.
Fortunately, an analysis of the Columbia Project from the 1990s found that around 90% the gold “is recoverable by conventional gravity and flotation methods to produce a gold and silver concentrate. Final processing of this gold concentrate may be accomplished by conventional methods.”
In a March presentation for an Australian financial services and fund managers conference that featured a photo of Herbert with Governor Greg Gianforte, the company claims recoveries of 96% gold and 77% silver. The decades of exploration and 400 drill holes has produced more than 34,000 samples that indicate the Columbia Project has 23.6 million tons of ore that holds 920,000 ounces of contained gold, according to Sentinel Metals.
Contact Laura Lundquist at lundquist@missoulacurrent.com.