An open-pit mine that wasn't: Ridge near Glacier Peak spared
It has an intriguing title, “An Open Pit Visible from the Moon.” The new book by history professor and Marysville native Adam Sowards tells of a conservation battle waged a half-century ago. Ground zero in that fight to stop a copper mine was a remote place of beauty in Snohomish County.
Miners Ridge is east of Darrington and south of North Cascades National Park, in the Glacier Peak Wilderness. In 1966, just two years after Congress passed the Wilderness Act, the Kennecott Copper Corporation announced it intended to build an open-pit mine there.
“I think it was really well known in the late 1960s, but it had fallen out of collective memory,” Sowards, who teaches at the University of Idaho, said about the struggle that pitted environmental activists against business interests.
In the end, although Kennecott had every legal right to dig that pit — described by foes as nearly seven football fields wide and deep enough to contain the Space Needle — it did not happen. Although the company had patented mining claims in the 1950s and explored the area in the ’60s, the author credits outspoken foes of the mine for what is there today, unspoiled land.
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Among activists whose views won out were towering figures in the environmental movement, including U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who led a protest hike, and Brock Evans, then Northwest representative of the Sierra Club.
https://www.heraldnet.com/news/an-open-pit-mine-that-wasnt-ridge-near-glacier-peak-spared/?utm_source=DAILY+HERALD&utm_campaign=ec35cc7e07-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d81d073bb4-ec35cc7e07-228635337
I wish we had someone like William O. Douglas on the Supreme Court instead of a lot of the idiots we have now.