Freeport-McMoRan to permanently remove mining claims from Mount Emmons and transfer back to U.S. Forest Service Options

[Gene Kooper]

Published this evening in the online Denver Post.

Crested Butte celebrates as longest running mine battle in the West nears end

CRESTED BUTTE — This end-of-the-road village has spent nearly 40 years transforming itself from a mining town into a thriving tourist destination despite the threat of a huge molybdenum mine on the hill overlooking downtown.

But the final chapter in the longest running mine fight in the West may soon be written.

Freeport-McMoRan — the world’s largest moly producer and owner of the Climax Mine near Leadville and the soon-to-shutter Henderson Mine near Empire — has inked a preliminary deal to permanently remove mining claims from Mount Emmons and return about 9,000 acres to the Forest Service. It will also work with Crested Butte to continue treating tainted water flowing from a long-defunct mine on the mountain.

For decades, every time molybdenum prices peaked, locals raised money and filed lawsuits to fight a proposed 1,000-worker mine digging 25 million tons of high-grade moly from the belly of beloved Mount Emmons. The crusade was at times so pitched that residents pledged to lay down in the middle of Whiterock Avenue to block ore-hauling trucks.

From the article it appears that if the town of Crested Butte can raise $2,000,000 Freeport-McMoRan will give up nearly 9,000 acres of unpatented lode claims on Mt. Emmons. Sen. Bennet has agreed to sponsor a bill that the article implies will permanently remove the area covered by those claims from mineral entry. At least that is how I read the story. The townsfolk and environmentalists are hailing this proposed action as forever removing Mt. Emmons and its large moly deposit from ever being mined.

The article implies that the Gold King Mine disaster acted as a catalyst for Freeport-McMoRan's decision. The company will still operate a water treatment plant to treat acidic metal-laden water that discharges into Coal Creek.

[EMac]

I'm still not following. I don't see any new entities coming into the discussion in CA:

Doing the research you don't provide (this is a theme btw), I see there are 7 active claimants in areas 015N018E, 014N017E & 014N018E for a total of 781 active claims. 590 lode claims, 86 millsites and 105 placers. By far the largest claimants are Castle Mountain Venture and Viceroy Gold Corp which account for 733 of those claims. Looking closer, it appears they're the same folks: Newcastle Corp out of Canada. The claims naming scheme uses sequential numbering, and we can see at CMM-119 that they switch from the claimant being Castle Mountain to Viceroy. 347 of those claims were filed in 2016, and of those, 104 lode claims were filed after the proclamation on 12 Feb 2016. I'm not seeing any juniors or external folks moving in on the action.

The oddest part to me is that Newcastle filed 104 claims after the proclamation, and 243 claims just prior to the proclamation. If I have the time, I'll dig into that, but I'm hoping someone here knows more. I do not see that a flood of new miners descended on the Castle Mountains filing claims. The last claimant I could find not associated with Newcastle filed their claims in 2008. My theory is the "new" claims are administrative actions as part of the national monument withdrawal.

Here's the LR2000 report that can be parsed in Excel:  Castle_Mountain.txt ( 82.46K ) Number of downloads: 278