Oregon's Rogue River draws in prospectors
GOLD HILL, Ore. -- When four dams on the Rogue River here were scheduled for removal, environmentalists predicted many benefits: more salmon and steelhead swimming upriver to spawn; more gravel carried downriver to replenish the riverbed; more rafters bobbing along 57 miles of newly opened water.
What they did not bargain for was the arrival this summer of a clutch of people, eager to sift through the tons of gravel for flakes of gold once hidden behind the dams.
Prospectors cluster slightly downriver from where the dams used to be. Their suction dredges blare together, in a discordant fanfare louder than lawnmowers.
Resentment now flows as freely as the river. Environmentalists and some riverside homeowners see the gold dredgers as noisy invaders rearranging the riverbed without care for the insects, fish and people who live in and along the Rogue. A state senator, Jason Atkinson, has announced that he will introduce legislation to ban the practice of dredging for gold; three state newspapers have editorialized in support of a temporary ban pending further study.
"This is interfering with the ambience, the sense of what the Rogue is about," said Bob Hunter, a lawyer with WaterWatch, a nonprofit environmental group. He spent 23 years organizing, cajoling and filing lawsuits to bring down the four dams, the last of which was removed Aug. 11.
The river, he said, "is about rafting and hiking and fishing."
"It's not about industrial mining," he added. "To have this adversely affect what this is all about is a shame."
Lesley Adams, who works for KSWild, another environmental group, said she feared for the health of the salmon runs that the Rogue has in more abundance than any other Oregon river but the Columbia.
Dam removals "have made great strides in restoring the salmon runs," she said. But, she added, "while we're working so hard to restore this river, we're letting gasoline-powered engines suck up the bottom of the river."
Bill Meyers, the Rogue Basin coordinator for the state Department of Environmental Quality, was less concerned, saying that new, tighter permit restrictions should protect the river, "provided the dredgers are following their permits."
For their part, the miners, many of them escaping a temporary dredging ban across the state line in California, see themselves as citizens whose rights are under siege.
Frank Werberger, 71, a retired pipe welder who drove up from his home in Ojai, Calif., to dredge the Rogue, said of his environmentalist adversaries: "They attack dredgers first because we're the ones they dislike the most. Then they will attack fishermen and kayakers. Then rafters."
A nugget of gold weighing three-quarters of an ounce dangles from a leather string on his chest, a reminder of the thrill of finding gold winking amid the gravel in a sluice pan.
A 2009 review of scientific studies by the California Department of Fish and Game highlighted numerous concerns about dredging's environmental effects, but found no unambiguous or lasting harm to a river's ecosystem.
Unless, that is, the neighbors in that ecosystem are included.
Dave Christiensen, 66, a retired landscape construction manager, owns a second home just below Gold Ray dam. "This year, these guys are going seven days a week," he said. "We've asked them, 'Could you put mufflers on these things?' They say, 'We have a permit and the government allows us to do this.'"
Mr. Bray, the dredger, said that his encounters with neighbors had been generally cordial. "I've converted some," he added.
Not Terrell and Sharon Smith of Gold Hill, who on Monday circulated an e-mail among the antidredging forces. "No one seems to be addressing what the homeowners are going through with fouled irrigation pumps from the silt and gravel the dredgers are kicking up," they wrote.