Mining Claim
Located within the Uncompahgre Wilderness is the Robin Redbreast Gold Mine, owned by Robert and Marjorie Miller of Montrose, Colorado. Marjorie Miller’s father staked the claims in 1938, more than 50 years before the land was designated Wilderness, and was preserved by the General Mining Act of 1872. The Forest Service has established requirements that would lessen mining impacts, such as reducing motorized vehicle use and night lighting. The Millers say workers will use picks and shovels to extract ore, haul it out with mule teams over existing trails, and use helicopters to deliver larger equipment to avoid the impacts of truck use. Environmental groups have expressed concern that acid mine drainage and the human footprint created by mining activities will degrade the Wilderness.
Read more about this topic: Uncompahgre Wilderness
Famous quotes containing the words mining and/or claim:
“Any relation to the land, the habit of tilling it, or mining it, or even hunting on it, generates the feeling of patriotism. He who keeps shop on it, or he who merely uses it as a support to his desk and ledger, or to his manufactory, values it less.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“It matters little comparatively whether the fields fill the farmer’s barn. The true husbandman will cease from anxiety, as the squirrels manifest no concern whether the woods will bear chestnuts this year or not, and finish his labor with every day, relinquishing all claim to the produce of his fields, and sacrificing in his mind not only his first but his last fruits also.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)