Abandoned hardrock mines create some of the most significant water quality problems facing our country, but in Congress we have an opportunity to invest in cleaning up pollution of the past, while modernizing our mining laws so we don’t face the same issues in the future
“The elders told us there is no point in building a visitors center if we don’t restore the land,” said Brad Parry, a tribal member leading up conservation work on the neglected landscape. “They told us they want this land back to the way it was when the massacre happened. For those who died to have a peace we need to restore the land to as natural as possible.”
For two decades, Whittlesey Creek National Wildlife Refuge has been the site of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service efforts to restore self-sustaining populations of coaster book trout. Trout Unlimited has been a partner in the work. The efforts haven’t been successful, but have increased knowledge about this unique form of brook trout and what could be needed to restore the fish to Lake Superior tributaries.
The work highlighted during the site tour provides a view of habitat related efforts to keep the Little Susitna River one of the most productive fisheries in the Mat-Su Valley.
Resurrection Creek, on the north end of the Kenai Peninsula near the community of Hope, still shows scars from placer mining that occurred more than 100 years ago
It looked like the brookies were almost certain to extirpate native cutts and that work to improve Jim Creek was a lost cause
The Yankee Fork historically supported robust populations of salmon, steelhead and trout, but mining – and the intensive timber harvest that accompanied it – reduced what once was a complex, meandering river into a virtual flume.
