Grassdog

I seem to have the convenient job of blogging on Sunday--usually a day off. It may just seem that I'm lazy, not writing about fancy things like phytoremediation and the mechanics of milling metals and whatnot, but really it's the luck of the draw. Because yesterday, we went for a swim in the grass alongside Waterdog Lake.



It was a 7.6-mile roundtrip hike from the wastewater treatment facility in Lake City (oooh, bubbling wastewater) up to Waterdog, through aspen groves and meadows of wildflowers. And just for the record, yes, we did swim in the lake, too--though not without some trepidation concerning alpine gators and tentacled aliens lurking in the weedy waters...

Out and about and overnight

best cowboy over the age of twelve

the rodeo queen and her horse, er, unicorn

stick horses waiting for their riders

As part of our initiative to understand the dynamics of the Lake City community, all of us attended and two of us competed in the Stick Horse Rodeo held downtown on Saturday. The Stick Horse Rodeo is apparently an annual event here and judging by the long list of competitors of all ages, it is a popular one.

Bland had a big day, winning overall best cowboy over the age of twelve. Julia served as color guard and rodeo queen as well as competing in the bucking bronco and barrel racing events. A video may be forthcoming.

That night, a few of us braved the ghosts and uncertain terrain of the mine to spend a night camping on site. We can report no hauntings but a lot of bats who possibly live in the adits or shaft, which was pretty exciting since at least one of us was an early advocate of a bat sanctuary.

Pennycress

Alpine pennycress (Thlaspi caerulescens) is a plant that is usually thought of as a wild flower or a weed. It’s a member of the brassica family that grows in western Colorado, Wyoming and up to Montana. It’s often found at high elevations in the Rockies as well as in the Alps and the Pyrenees, among other places.

In an earlier post about phyto or green remediation, I wrote about the possibility of using plants to draw heavy metals out of contaminated soil. Alpine pennycress is a particularly promising plant for remediation because it can tolerate high amounts of cadmium, lead, and zinc. It has also been shown to draw cadmium and zinc out of the soil and can be used to mitigate erosion on lead contaminated soil.

We’ve found alpine pennycress growing on the site of the Ute Ulay. It’s small and scrubby but it’s there. This seems to be a promising sign, both for the soil and for the possibility of phytoremediation.

And there’s more: alpine pennycress’s cousin field pennycress is being developed in the US as a source of biodiesel. Pennycress is not useful as livestock feed, though its leaves and seeds are a good source of oil, and it’s production would not compete with land for food production because it is used as a winter cover crop.

As far as we can tell, alpine pennycress is not being tested for bio-fuel possibilities, perhaps because it has fewer leaves and smaller seeds and doesn’t grow in the mid-west, where most of the field pennycress research is going on. But what if it was useful for bio-fuel on a small scale? We could use the plants for soil remediation and then process them as bio-diesel to run the Buckeye Engine.* An almost perfect loop!

*This plan is not scientifically verifiable.

Digging IN

CHARRETTE: An intensive design session that drives ideas forward. Today the team grouped at the DIRT office early in the morning to kick off our charrette. The day began with establishing an overall vision statement that reads something like this, “The Ute Ulay Mine and Town Site will be an inhabitable place. It must be environmentally conscious, educational and historically sensitive.” Although this statement is subject to change, it served as a guide by which any concept can be validated or tossed to the wind.



Three groups separated to discuss and drill down into the three subjects in the vision statement: Habitation, education and environment. The small groups moved quickly and effectively to hash out the specifics of each subject. I participated in the habitation group, and we developed both a map and phased diagram to describe how habitation would take place on the site. In concert with the education and environment group, the ideas developed resembled a series of building blocks. Miraculously, every set of blocks seemed to fit together with another set.

Phytoremediation

Phytoremediation or green remediation refers to the use of plants to treat environmental problems. It does not require excavation or removal of contaminated soil and is very low impact environmentally.

Phytoremediation is based around the use of hyperaccumulators. These plants draw heavy metals and other toxic materials out of the soil through their roots and into their leaves. The plants are then harvested and removed from the site, taking the metals with them. In some cases, valuable materials which are toxic in soil at high concentrations, like zinc, can be extracted from the plants and sold at the going rate. This process is called phytomining.

In addition to its environmental benefits, phytoremediation is extremely cost effective. In other words, it's cheap. For each acre of contaminated soil, it’s estimated phytoremediation will cost $250 to $1000. Traditional remediation runs around $1 million dollars an acre.

So why is this not a more common practice? For one thing, not all metals can be treated through phytoremediation. Lead, for example, which is a problem on the town site of the Ute Ulay, cannot be treated this way as far as science knows (although plants can be used as a sort of barrier to trap lead in by preventing erosion). Another reason may be that phytoremediation is an ongoing process and can take several growing seasons to bring soil toxins down to an acceptable level. Traditional remediation is generally a once and done deal that involves a combination of capping and relocating contaminated soil. But to compare, the tailings piles from the Ute Ulay (adjacent to the site on public land) remediated by the Bureau of Land Management a few years ago cost about $1 million dollars. It took ten years and a lot of work to raise that much money. If it had taken ten years to remediate the land using plants, the results might have been similar for a markedly smaller amount of money.

There are other considerations with phytoremediation including making sure that the metal-laden plants are not going to be problematic for wildlife (fences can do wonders in this department) and that respiration doesn't turn a ground problem into an air problem. Additionally, amendments of some kind must generally be added to disturbed soil to make it suitable for new plant life. At least one promising experiment done using pulp from paper plants has shown that what is normally an industrial waste can become a food source for bioremediating plants.

Artist Mel Chin, working with scientists like Rufus Chaney currently of the USDA, brought broader attention to this process through his piece Revival Field (1990-present) and while scientists continue to experiment with it, phytoremediation is a nascent technology in many ways.

Stay tuned for another blog post about alpine pennycress, a Rocky Mountain weed and hyperaccumulator extraordinaire.

Model making

We are developing a model of the Ute Ulay mine site which will help us with our ideation process and assist with the communication of our ideas at the Artposium on August 13^th. In keeping with one of our priorities: Sustainability, the model is constructed from recycled materials, cardboard boxes, wood, metal and other bits and pieces of interesting scrap from the mine site itself. The model is beginning to take on some character, a combination of low tech D.I.Y and model making precision.

The arduous process of making the contours of the site combined with the joys of 3 functioning glue guns helps us to imagine what might be possible for the future reuses of the buildings and environs.

Expeditions, Experimentation, Sheep, and Burros

We undertook some highly scientific experiments at the Ute Ulay yesterday, sending this extremely high tech exploratory pod down the mine shaft (through a systems of ropes, weights, and tubes that allowed us to stay safely far from the open shaft, please don't try this at home).




Then, on a stormy morning, we drove up to Engineer Pass for Sheep Day! We saw sheep, heard their bells, watched their guard dogs chase a pika, and ate some extremely delicious lamb stew. Luckily, we rushed back to Lake City just in time to feed carrots to burros. Tomorrow, we dig into a full day of work, together, and in smaller groups, fleshing out our ideas for the mine site.

Ideas Are Flying! (Hannah)

We've been scurrying around, gathering information like busy pikas over the last couple weeks, and it's been quite the whirlwind. We’ve toured the mine site with a geologist, an archaeologist, a hydrologist, a physicist, an environmental engineer, and a wildlife (pika!) biologist; we’ve met with the county commissioners, the Youth Corps, the Lake Fork Valley Conservancy, a schoolteacher, a local artist, the town historian and newspaper publisher, the director of Lake City Arts, the owners of The Texan Resort, and a variety of other people from the community, both formally and informally. We have a local group of advisors we meet with weekly, and a public survey is finding its way around town. Needless to say, we have gathered a plethora of perspectives about Lake City and the Ute Ulay.

What now? Well, tonight, for the first time, we gathered together as a group to throw some ideas on the table. Don't get me wrong, ideas have been percolating all along. After all, we do have a refrigerator covered with "Ridiculous Ideas." But this was our first formal chance to share. With seven minutes each, we quickly covered a wall of paper with inspiration and creative thinking about how we might go about shaping place and providing opportunities for interaction with it.

It's an exciting moment, this halfway point, with so much in flux. And next? Some long days in the D.I.R.T. office, maybe some long nights, a lot more talk, big groups, small groups, dreaming, organizing, presenting... Two weeks down, two to go!

Pikas!

image attribution

Pikas are small relatives of rabbits who live in the alpine habitats of the western US and Canada. They are damn cute. They are also an indicator species - kind of like canaries in the environmental coal mine - that can help us to understand the effects of climate change. Chris Ray, a biologist and pika researcher from the University of Colorado, came for dinner and a talk on Friday to give us the details.

It seems that in research done in the Great Basin in the Western US, pikas are disappearing from areas in California and Nevada where they were once plentiful. The hypothesis is that swings in temperature and snowpack attributable to climate change make it impossible for sensitive pikas, who don’t hibernate, to insulate themselves from cold and heat. Among the few places in the Great Basin study where pika populations remained robust were old mine tailings. There seems to be something about the habitat tailings provide that is beneficial to the pikas.

Before dinner, we trekked up to the Ute-Ulay with Dr. Ray in the midst of a downpour. While we waited out the storm in the car, the intrepid scientist donned her raincoat and went out to scout for pika pellets, which look like peppercorns, in the pouring rain. She found some.

What does this mean? Well, what’s clear is that at one time, pikas lived at the mine site. We don’t know if they still do but Dr. Ray’s suggestion is that as we are envisioning what the site could be, we consider the possibility of a research area where tailings could be arranged and rearranged in a controlled way to find out just what it is about these piles of mine left-overs that can help to sustain pikas when undisturbed areas in the same temperature range cannot.

The Ute-Ulay Center for Pika Research? We aren’t ruling anything out yet.

Man and Machine

Linda Wysong

Belt and wheel that turns the Ball Crusher

When thinking about mining it is often difficult to adjust down from the industrial to the human scale. The Ute Ulay Mine is no exception. Yesterday, Becky wrote an informative account of the group’s visit to the Ute Ulay Mine with Matt Ingram. I would like to continue musing about that experience from a different perspective. How do historic industrial sites such as the Ute Ulay function symbolically within our culture.

One aspect of industrial artifacts seems to be the simple fact that as the American landscape becomes more predictable, there is appreciation of structures outside of the strip mall vocabulary. The Mill is not a singular and predictable design but a product of process and adaptation. Its workings reflect times of boom, bust and morphing technology. There is value in this physical record of time and the discipline of making do and making it work.

In the west, the industrial age is definitely over. Much of our production and economy has been either altered by automation or moved off shore. As fewer and fewer of us do physical work, there is a romanticization of labor. The post-industrial age tends to look back to that time as an uncomplicated, golden age of clarity and hard work. This attitude often generates a view of history that can be best described as nostalgia. When history becomes a vehicle for escape and not a living covenant with past generations it is robbed of its richness and integrity.

Matt Ingram tour Guide extraordinaire

Our journey with Matt Ingram through the labyrinthine Ute Ulay Mill was a refreshing reminder that the mine is far more then a static icon. The stacked floors of wheels, belts and engines were the platform for an on-going performance. The choreography of people and machines was and continues to be an intricate dance. The Buck Eye might be a stunning engine but it took knowledge, precision, and a sense of humor to get it started. Mr. Ingram obviously loves his work and was able to communicate his engagement in the Mining industry.

The history of the Ute Ulay mine reaches back to the time of Manifest Destiny. It is an icon of resource extraction and the politics of power. Yet it is also a living place were the community can chart a course that embodies its shifting relationship with the land. As we move forward, it will be a challenge to honor the past and look toward the future.