BREEN – It was a room full of skeptical people who have seen this all before – or so they thought – Thursday night at the Breen Community Building as the leaders of Metallic Minerals tried to put to bed the fears area residents hold over the company’s exploratory drilling in La Plata Canyon.
Over the last three years, the Canadian company has drilled eight holes, each between about 2,600 feet and 4,300 feet, on a small mining claim on Forest Service Road 792 near the headwaters of Bedrock Creek underneath Gibbs Peak.
The cores extracted show an estimated 1.2 billion pounds of relatively low-grade copper, in addition to 30,000 ounces to 50,000 ounces of platinum and palladium, said Scott Petsel, the company’s president, all contained within about 147 million tons of rock.
That doesn’t mean a mine within the confines of the 12,300-acre La Plata Project, which straddles the La Plata-Montezuma county line, is likely – and certainly not anytime soon, Petsel said.
But residents of the La Plata River corridor say they’ve seen miners come and go from the canyon, often leaving a toxic or unsightly legacy, and are less than thrilled to see prospectors return.
“I know that there’s a bad legacy from mining and that there are impacts on local communities,” Petsel acknowledged to those assembled Thursday night.
Mining safety and environmental standards have changed dramatically, he insisted, and any impact to water quality in the La Plata or Mancos rivers would be closely monitored. And even a conversation about what a mine could look like is premature for several reasons.
Logan Powell, the company’s project manager, noted that the average elapsed time between the discovery of copper and first production in a mine is nearly 29 years. While Metallic Minerals has sunk $9 million into the project, the mineral discoveries are sufficient to warrant further exploration but not enough to attract a mining company given current copper prices (Metallic Minerals specializes only in exploration; any mining would be performed by a third party).
Petsel said exploration will continue as long as intuition and evidence make drilling worthwhile, and more importantly, as long as investors are willing to fund it. The company didn’t drill in 2024 because of a lack of funds and its share price dropped.
Still, Petsel’s and Powell’s hedging was of little comfort to residents, one of whom went so far as to say that the connection between exploration and mining is akin to that of making out and sex – one may not lead to the other, but “you’re at least thinking,” he said.
“You might prove there’s a resource there, and then we’ll never be left alone, and it won’t be you guys doing the mining,” the man added.
Another resident, raising the alarm of a worst-case scenario, said the region could see the development of an open-pit mine. Prospectors said that prophesy could be all but ruled out. The state would almost certainly deny such an application, Petsel said, given what would certainly be vehement public opposition.
Still, there are more immediate plans that trigger concern among residents and environmentalists.
Metallic Minerals has received approval for, but not realized, a plan to use water from Bedrock, Boren and Madden creeks for drilling. Although the company has only drilled at the headwaters of Bedrock Creek so far, it has received approval to use up to 289,000 gallons per year of water from the three sub-basins.
Rather than truck water up 1,400 vertical feet from the mouth of the canyon, as they are now, the prospectors would pump water from the creek near the drill site and replace it with water trucked from the Animas River directly into the La Plata River. The plan makes whole downstream water rights holders, but would decrease flows in the creek between the drill site and the La Plata River.
Powell said the plan has never been used because it was “not a good fit” and does not match the company’s operation plans approved by the U.S. Forest Service. However, he said it was “entirely possible” that the plan could be implemented in the future.
With the drilling season over for the year, the trucks and helicopters that bring the prospectors and their equipment to the site have fallen quiet, for now. And despite the criticism Metallic Minerals leaders faced – Petsel faced a tough room Thursday night, he acknowledged – the company’s leaders say they are committed to transparency.
Still, that wasn’t enough for some in the room.
“Since somebody else is going to do the mining and not you guys, what difference does it make if you make reassurances that you’re going to do things the right way?” one skeptic asked.
rschafir@durangoherald.com
