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.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Where Dams Once Stood, Prospectors Spur Anger
RRK in NYT
Sep 03, 2010
Leah Nash for The New York Times
With the removal of the Gold Ray Dam on the Rogue River in Oregon, salmon and steelhead will have better access to 333 miles of spawning habitat upstream.
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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.
Another prospector, Dave Bray, 47, is a native of the Rogue Valley. Emerging from the waters of the Rogue, he pulled down the top of his wetsuit and talked about his feeling that his hobby was “spiritual.” Fish, he said, come and swim around him, eating the insect life dislodged by his dredging hose.
His friend Ken Kriege, 54, of Ontario, Calif., added that prospecting had environmental benefits, like loosening compacted gravel, which provides a better spawning surface for fish, and removing toxic metals, like the mercury left behind by Oregon’s 19th-century gold miners.
As for damage, Mr. Kriege said that the dredges’ impact on the riverbed was “like fluffing a pillow,” and that the recent removal of nearby Gold Ray dam had turned the river into “chocolate milk,” creating more temporary turbidity than any dredger.
Senator Atkinson and the environmental leaders point out that many cars parked along the river carry California license plates.
But Beth Moore, general permits coordinator for the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, said 1,205 dredging permits had been issued this year, up from 934 in 2009. Of 432 new applications, only about 54 — or 12.5 percent — of the permits went to Californians.
The prospectors must follow newly stringent state rules aimed at keeping a distance between dredges and reducing the size of their hoses.
The removal of dams in the area of the Rogue River near Grants Pass and Gold Hill, about 12 miles north of Medford, Ore., has been both a blessing and a curse to the miners.
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