Memories of Mud Lake

I wish I had more memories of Mud Lake. In fact, I can’t honestly say that I’ve seen the lake itself or its adjacent wetlands, since I have never knowingly stepped foot on the stretch of sagebrush sea between Idaho State Highway 33 and the foothills of the Centennial Mountains. But a man I’ve worked with for some years now has family with a farm near there, and his stories of getting farm semis stuck in muddy fields and working around the clock harvesting spuds always make me smile. 

But I don’t have no memories, either. I remember driving through Terreton on the way to a track meet in Salmon, Idaho in what must have been 2001. I saw the brown sign that reads: MUD LAKE WMA. My young mind thought of Yellowstone National Park, and the mud pots, and the caked bison that always lie what always feels to me, who am not even a parent, to be way too close to the roiling muck.

Although this is not what Mud Lake is, it turns out to be a fine association, once the scale of connectivity is zoomed out enough to recognize Mud Lake and the wetlands and sagebrush steppe that surround it as an important part of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. 

I have more recent memories of Mud Lake, too. In 2017, after completing the portion of the through-hike we call the Yell-to-Hell that carried us through the ungodly Beaverhead Mountains, I recall a lovely visit to the Mud Lake Market after being picked up on Idaho State Highway 28. Coming out of the market with a Mountain Dew in each hand (how apt an image for a piece about mountains and water and downstream effects), I looked back at the ridge lines of the Centennials and the Beaverheads, which we had traversed, and the imposing Diamond Peak of the Lemhi Range, where we were headed next. 

And therefore Mud Lake is, for me, a focal point, a convergence of mountain streams, mountain views, and Mountain Dews.

My most recent memory of Mud Lake is from June of 2020. This was the last time I drove east on Highway 33, after an exceptional bout of clumsy bird watching at Market Lake (another Wildlife Management Area, like Mud Lake). The place had changed. Mud Lake Market had been shut down. I felt sad.

But behind the market, the ridge lines still sat on the northern horizon, leading to the sky, as William T. Vollmann says, without occluding the sky. “Indeed their height made the sky seem higher.” (Riding Toward Everywhere, pg. 110). And if those mountains, which connect the sky to the plain, were still there, then the lake and the wetlands must have still been there, too, just behind the road. 

It’s been almost six months since I’ve driven through Terreton, just south of Mud Lake Wildlife Management Area, but I’ll bet that the mountains are still there on the horizon as they are in my memory. And if they are, then so is the snow that accumulates in them as I write in January of 2021. This same snow will become the runoff and streams and creeks that form the braided channels of Camas Creek, which trickles down across the sagebrush steppe where Chief Joseph’s Nimiipuu had a small but significant victory over the U.S. Army in 1877 just before heading east across the world’s first National Park.

And it is, of course, the same water that will end its surface-life in one of the managed wetlands around Mud Lake. Here, this mountain water will disappear into the earth, adding to the Eastern Snake River Plain Aquifer for some hundreds of years before (hopefully) being of use to someone or something in a still-alive world. 

The Kilgore Project

Which finally brings me to a point I should have started with: the Kilgore Project. After having their drilling permits revoked at the end of 2019 (the scope of which revoking was reaffirmed by U.S. Federal Judge Lynn Winmill in May of 2020), Excellon Resources (formerly Otis Gold) is attempting once more to kick start exploratory drilling in the watershed of West Camas Creek and Corral Creek in the foothills of the Centennials.

The ultimate goal of their drilling is a cyanide heap leach mine with an expected five year yield of some hundreds of thousands of ounces of gold. Which gold-yield would mean, of course, a large tailings dam containing god only knows how many gallons, liters, or acre-feet of cyanide-laced, heavy-metals-containing, toxic slurry. 

Which brings me once more to the point that I actually started with: Mud Lake. Mud Lake is the final resting place of Camas Creek before it sinks into the aquifer. This is, as goes without saying, the same Camas Creek atop whose headwaters the Kilgore cyanide heap leach mine is proposed.  

Why We Should Protect Mud Lake

According to the Mud Lake Wildlife Management Area 2014-2023 Management Plan, there are a total of 49 multi-agency-designated sensitive species that live in or significantly utilize Mud Lake WMA. This includes the greater sage-grouse, which have been the special focus of interstate conservation efforts since 2015.

In the authoritative words of the Management Plan,

Greater sage-grouse are designated as a Candidate species for listing under the Endangered Species Act, are a national conservation priority, and a key planning species for federal land managers that have significant land ownership in the MDWMA landscape and Habitat District. 

Also,

Greater sage-grouse depend on specific qualitative attributes of sage-steppe and wet meadow habitats that are not addressed simply by expanding the extent of these habitats on MDWMA. By identifying greater sage-grouse as a Conservation Target, we are seeking to maintain and restore highly functional sage-steppe and wet meadow habitat that will benefit many other species that rely on these same habitat types.  

Although I am not a biologist or ecologist, it would be difficult to imagine a more important step to take in protecting sage-steppe and wet meadow habitat than protecting the upstream watersheds that feed into them. For Mud Lake WMA, these upstream waters are Camas Creek and the watersheds that drain into it.

Sage-grouse and the habitat that they represent aside, human usage of Mud Lake WMA has skyrocketed in recent decades, with visitor use increased from 6,505 in 1999 to 27,035 in 2005, according to the same Mud Lake WMA Management Plan. Furthermore, apparently 71 percent of Mud Lake users have hunting licenses. By some quick calculations, we see that in 2005 alone, over 19,000 people went to Mud Lake to hunt. 

This means that there are at least 19,000 specific individuals who have a vested interest in protecting Mud Lake and its upstream waters.

Mud Lake and the Kilgore Project

Now here’s the real confluence of the Kilgore Project and Mud Lake: the earthen dams that are used to contain toxic mining tailings can, and do, fail. And when they do, the effects are anything but local. We can remember the recent disaster in Romania. On January 30, 2000, a tailings dam broke and spewed cyanide-laced slurry into the Tisza River.

A 40 km flow of toxic sludge destroyed all life in that river. The remnants of that heavy-metal-containing sludge went on to flow 1000 km through Hungary and the Balkans, entering the Danube and poisoning drinking water supplies in three countries. Jozsef Feiler of the Friends of Earth in Hungary said, “Everything down to bacteria is dead. There’s more life in a sewage channel than this river now. Nothing is alive. Zero.”

Mud Lake lies not 50 miles, which is about 80 kilometers, from West Camas Creek and the proposed cyanide heap leach gold mine. If you or anyone you know has ever visited Mud Lake WMA, then this is a call to make your voice heard and call for the protection of upstream waters from an anything-but-safe earthen dam containing toxic slurry directly upstream.

A New Forest Service Comment Period in 2021

Since sage-grouse, sandhill cranes, mallards, and garter snakes are not eligible to comment during National Forest Service public comment periods, this is an invitation to the (at least, and just from 2005) 19,000 hunters who have a strong voice and a personal interest in keeping Mud Lake alive and toxic -slurry-free.

And not to leave out the herds of mule deer, elk, and moose that you may see in Yellowstone National Park during the summer. Many of these animals winter in Idaho’s sagebrush-steppe in and around Mud Lake. These ungulates’ comments aren’t counted by the Forest Service either. So if you’ve visited Yellowstone to enjoy the wildlife, consider this invitation to you as well, to comment in order to protect the larger ecosystems that allow Yellowstone to remain rich and wild.

Although I respect the gravity-given rights of cyanide and heavy metals to pool in and dominate Mud Lake’s wetlands for decades to come, I am more interested in protecting the rights of the wildlife and the public to enjoy this special place (and the special places intimately connected to it) for much longer than the five years that Excellon Resources expects to extract gold upstream.