Mining & Yearning

I know it used to be a mine because it said so on the map and there was evidence, tailing piles falling away from a road cut in the red sandstone mesa, a dilapidated ore chute, poured concrete foundations. I know it could yet be a mine because the slick rock sandwiched bright streaks of minerals, blue-green stripes of oxidized copper and the chalky pinks of cobalt bloom. I know it is going to be a mine because of the claim notice I found, folded inside an upside-down Diet Coke can on the end of a four foot wooden stake, conspicuous at the mouth of a draw like litter or a shooting target. The aluminum shone like god-sent garbage, a silver shimmer a few feet off the desert floor. The paper within delineates the boundaries of the claim, all the veins, dips, and angles within the rectangles formed when these stakes were pounded in. I find other cans-on-stakes, A&Ws and Coke Zeroes with their lids cut off and the aluminum edges bent like broken teeth holding tight a secret, a piece of paper curled inside each. They stand sentry, drawing lines in parcels declaring four claims of what would be the first mine to operate in the former Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument.

Less than a year after President Trump issued a proclamation diminishing Bear’s Ears and Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monuments, before the legality of this reduction has been settled, before the boundaries have really changed, mining companies are reverting to 1800s law and claiming parcels of these areas for their use. If they’re not public lands, they belong to whoever grabs them. So it is a Canadian mining firm has the first mining claims in GSENM. I’m on the northeastern edge of the monument, three and a half miles from Capitol Reef National Park, approaching a remote mine on Colt Mesa. A copper deposit was discovered here in 1968 and mined sporadically in the early 1970s. By President Clinton’s designation of GSENM in 1996, the mine had been abandoned for more than twenty years. Now, fifty years since mineral veins were first identified here, mining companies are moving back in. Survey has indicated high contents of cobalt, copper, and zinc, “battery minerals” which are increasingly required in electric vehicle production.

Though the company claims that surface exploration work will begin this summer, it’s hard to imagine anything moving with much alacrity out here. The only fast things are the flies and the wind. Everything else, cactus and sagebrush and development, is slow to take root and grow. Colt Mesa is two hours from the nearest gas station, three from a grocery store and at least six from Salt Lake City. The road in has been recently graded but is persistently rough and narrow. Wilderness protection groups have promised lawsuits and legislature before any mining moves in. Still, they ask for the public to report any earthmovers or trailers or tread marks. I’ve only found these canned claims and footprints from other protectors who’ve come to observe and document. Even here, seeing it, I don’t quite believe.
 
I read the archaic legalese of the mining claims several times, looking for something tangible: a schedule of action, an authority I believe in, a justification to this audacity, a right. I realize their power is teleological: stating authority creates authorization. Staking claim makes it claimed. I consider my recourse. I could stay here. I could block the road from speculators and mining machinery. But when would they come? This week? This season? Or not until this remote high desert in Southern Utah becomes less grey, more definite, finding the hard lines between public and private, value and profit, resource and remorse. I might wait a long time.

There are two realities here and I can choose which one to prescribe to. Either this is Monument or it is not. In this liminal wild, I feel my options bifurcating. If it is still Monument, collecting resources is illegal but picking up garbage is a duty. Artifacts must be more than fifty years old to remain. Newer objects are trash. I could remove the stakes, crush the cans, and shred the paper. I could blast out the cinderblocks and the concrete and call it service. But if it’s not Monument? Everything is less certain and more expensive. It becomes an investment opportunity and I’m too late. This one’s claimed. I should seek my riches elsewhere.

Later, a friend says it is just that, literally: a scheme. It’s one of those that invites investors, pays the top people outrageous salaries, and then declares bankruptcy in a few years. Tax write-off. They might just mine a little, surface work. Nothing more. That might be how the mine functioned between 1971 and 1974: they dug some tunnels and moved some ore to satisfy investors and then shuttered quietly after a few years. I could believe it. I’d like to believe it. The firm’s website is lacking in legitimacy and schedule but abundant in investment pitches and optimistic forecasts. Their financial reports are eagerly supplied but there’s nothing of logistics or legal right.

And if the first mine in the Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument is nothing more than a pyramid scheme? Maybe I should feel better. When I tell my friend Brynn she seems peeved. “Folks are tied in knots over this,” she says, “and it’s only a scheme?” Maybe a mere annoyance is the best-case scenario. But part of me can’t help feeling that the worst is yet to come. If the fraudsters are the first here, the more meticulous and nefarious are likely not far behind. And perhaps these initial claims will come to prove that the protectors will go on protecting and our public lands are not for sale. But perhaps the mining companies will edge into these loopholes and widen them with force and money and anti-conservancy court decisions. I will not write off this threat yet. There is more than profit at stake.

I sleep on the toe of Colt Mesa on a slanting slab of slick rock. I refuse the level concrete bed nearby. I think about the divisions, about the mining and the yearning, the separating of the human from the wild and the earth from itself. The moon is nearly full and in its illumination I know there is only one reality, the one we’re living in, where the mine is abandoned and threats against it are yet impotent words. The desert is not shaped by stakes. Claims require basis. In the morning, I’ll move off the red sandstone. I’ll leave the cans holding their secret plan in the corners of their self-imposed grid. I’ll drive to my home in the nearby high desert and pledge vigilance. The antithesis of extraction is creation and so we must. I’ll plan on how to fill that space with the beauty of itself, cobalt in the moonlight and human forms ascending its wide apron, a different sort of exploration, one for wealth without profit and sharing like the sun.