The snags of Windy Craggy mine.

• Author: Kleeschulte, Chuck

The Snags of Windy Craggy Mine

The wave of business support in Southeast Alaska for the mineral industry's rebirth continues to grow this summer. But one of the projects is causing American business and community leaders, not counting environmentalists, to stop and consider whether the mineral project, while a gold mine for Canada, might not prove to be the pits for Alaska.

The debate is over the proposed Windy Craggy copper, gold and silver mine located in British Columbia. Tucked in the Wrangell-St. Elias Mountains across the border from Glacier Bay National Park and Monument, the proposed huge open-pit mine is in the midst of wilderness, 80 miles north of Haines at the head of the Alaska Panhandle.

The mine, expected to be North America's largest copper mine, is proposed to produce 500 operating jobs and have an operating life of from 30-50 years. But while the mine is expected to generate nearly $160 million over its first decade in taxes to British Columbia and Canada, and pump more than $550 million from wages and supplies into the economy of British Columbia, its main positive effect on Alaska is that it should generate up to 125 transportation jobs - most based in Haines - through ore hauling and ore ship loading.

The problems for Haines, however, are that the mine is located just north of the confluence of the scenic Tatshenshini and Alsek rivers and will require construction of a 70-mile haul road along part of the Tatshenshini, connecting to the Haines Highway and leading to a deep-water port in Haines. At present, the leading sites for the port are at the Haines city dock, next to the state's ferry terminal in Lutak Inlet, or at the nearby surplus U.S. Army fuel tank depot.

At least in the view of some tourism executives, the haul road and a needed bridge would drown the marketability of one of Haines' summertime tourism assets. The community is used as a staging area for wilderness raft trips down the 160 miles of the two rivers leading into Dry Bay and the Gulf of Alaska.

It's also feared that in winter the rumble of ore trucks - some 30,000 trips a year, with a truck likely to pass roughly every 15 minutes - might dampen the interest of visitors, who now flock to Haines from late October into January to see the congregation of up to 3,000 bald eagles that roost in the trees of the state's Chilkat Bald Eagle Preserve. The Haines Highway passes through the midst of the best eagle-viewing habitat, as the narrow road parallels the river for about 25 miles leading north from Haines.

Besides tourism concerns, fishermen worry that ore that might blow off passing trucks could contaminate either the Chilkat River or Lutak Inlet on the south side of Haines - much like the harbor at Skagway has been contaminated by heavy metals because of ore terminal-loading operations there. They also fear that mine activities might contaminate the Tatshenshini and Alsek rivers. The Alsek supports major commercial salmon fisheries in Dry Bay, south of Yakutat.

Environmentalists specifically worry that the acidic runoff from the sulphite ore deposit's tailings will kill the rivers, much as sulfuric acid from a smaller siver mine at Houston, B.C. -...