by Jerry D. Rose
Lewis and Clark and those who followed them on the Oregon Trail encountered many a difficulty along the way of their trips across the upper Great Plains; but they were spared some of the nasty surprises that await modern travelers across that region. My own travels earlier this month involved flying with some of my family from Jacksonville to Rapid City SD, then going by Caravan Tours to the Mount Rushmore and the Crazy Horse monuments, across southern Montana to the Little Big Horn, scene of “Custer’s Last Stand,” then down through Wyoming to Yellowstone Park and thence to Salt Lake City, from whence we fly back to Florida.
There were inspiring things to be experienced with this trip: the majesty of Rushmore and of the Grand Teuton Mountains, the story of the heroic effort to commemorate native Americans in the area by construction of the Crazy Horse monument, the waving fields of grass in Montana and Wyoming, the pleasure of hearing the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, a clever re-enactment of the travails of an Oregon Trail journey in the 19th century. But I must speak now of my disappointments with grimmer realities encountered along the way.
The unease began with our bus trip across southern Montana, a state which, like others along our journey, has two major industries according to our tour director: tourism and mining. The tourism derives from the scenes, both natural and man-made, that make a picture-postcard beauty of the region: its mountains, lakes, geysers, forests and meadows, its free-roaming animal life featuring bears, deer, elk and bison, the flower baskets that grace the streets of virtually every small town. But we first encountered scenes of strip coal mining in Montana and our tour director, in explaining the mining process, described a necessary first step of removing the “over-burden” from the mine site. I had never heard this term, which is apparently common in mining circles, a term used for the scraping away of the soil covering the minerals: thus defacing some of the “purple majesty” of strip-mined mountains, not to mention that it removes (as if a nuisance “burden”) that very soil on which the plant and animal life of the area depends.
When we got to our final tour destination, Salt Lake City, a few of us who took a side trip “on our own” experienced over-burden removal with a vengeance. The Kennecott copper mine, a few miles outside SLC, is billed as the world’s largest open pit copper mine, and it probably deserves the title. The visitor center, the inevitable accompaniment of every tourist destination, was a museum of the operations of the company: an affiliate of the conglomerate Rio Tinto, notable for its destruction of Amazon forests and Amazonian people, and for its brutal tactics in dealing with any indigenous protesters of its mining operations. The 20-minute video they showed in the center was a masterpiece of corporate green-washing of environmentally-destructive operations, a florid description of how the company has “restored” older mining sites and made the waters flow and the flowers and birds and four-legged animals roam once again as the “over-burden” of soil removed during mining operations is relocated to produce these marvels of corporate responsibility. Problem is: where does one find these marvels? Certainly not with the naked eye which sees only a grotesque hole in the ground and dump trucks moving relentlessly in their caravan of destruction as they haul the over-burden to wherever it is being dumped.
I could say more about the naturalist disappointments on this trip. I could write at some length on the elephant not being seen through the bus window or at the photo stop as our tour directors minimized the significance of the paucity of roaming animals actually seen or the denuding of tree foliage from huge tracts of Yellowstone with dead stumps still standing or allowed to remain where they finally fell after the oft-noted fire of 1989. This raised questions for me about what “forest management” in the west is all about. But that’s a topic for a later writing. I want to look again at some of my pretty pictures.
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