Tailings to Transformation
Photography: Timothy Thimmes
The contrast couldn’t be more striking. A century ago, young men risked their lives for three dollars a day under the ground of upper Empire Canyon. They rode the elevator of the Daly West Mine 1,200 feet below, drilled and blasted, and mucked out tons of silver ore. On the surface, they separated waste rock from pay dirt and dumped the waste onto an ever-growing “tailings” pile.
Today, a different generation of young men has resumed digging at the Daly West. But now they’re not looking for the glint of silver. Their goal is to prepare the ground in order to build a palace for the well-heeled. This palace will boast a spa of the finest quality, “Mountain Craftsman” architecture, and interior design by the finest talents using the best of local artisans and craftsmen.
A century ago, this place near the top of Deer Valley’s Empire Canyon was called the Daly West tailings dump. By the winter of 2010/2011, it will be called the Montage Resort and Spa. And that transformation is drawing national attention as the best example in America of turning an environmental disaster zone into an environmentally responsible development.
“We were able to see beyond the physical condition of the property and see what its potential was,” says Jeff Mongan, the senior vice president of Montage’s developer, The Athens Group of Phoenix. In a plan-strewn office near Park City’s old Main Street, Mongan explains why Athens, after completing Four Seasons, Loews and Ritz-Carlton hotels and the breathtaking Montage at Laguna Beach, wanted its next project to be located on a site impacted by a century of heavy environmental abuse.
“It was basically a kind of a dump,” Mongan says of the first time he saw the site in Empire Canyon. “But,” he says, “we could tell from the setting that the high ground at Empire Pass was the best of the land available there.”
The site, next to Deer Valley’s Empire Lodge, didn’t look so bad in the winter when most Deer Valley visitors see it. Snow covered the scars, the piles of old mining debris, and the mountain of waste rock. But come spring, melting snows revealed the true mess, and worse, the snowmelt filtered through the estimated 53,000 cubic yards of waste rock, carrying measurable amounts of lead, zinc, arsenic and other toxic heavy metals downstream. The state of Utah issued a fish advisory, urging those catching fish in Daly West-fed Silver Creek not to consume their catches because of elevated arsenic levels found in the fish tissue.
Landowner United Park City Mines (UPCM), and later Talisker, the Canadian development company that purchased all of UPCM’s holdings in Deer Valley and elsewhere, faced a costly liability. They could cap the tailings pile with topsoil and vegetation, abandon any thought of developing the site and continue to carry the liability of a contaminated area, or they could tackle the mess head on and remove it.
Capping was the easy, cheap alternative, but over time, the cap could erode, and Talisker would always be liable for contamination. “Leaving that material on that slope is not conducive to long-term integrity,” Park City’s Environmental Coordinator Jeff Schoenbacher explains. “We could have future problems of sediment coming down the hill and impacting our watershed.”
Park City, Talisker, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency wanted the liability removed forever. And the only practical way to do it was one dump truck at a time. A disposal site was available at Richardson Flats, located east of Highway 40 outside of Park City. It offered a natural volcanic formation that prevents heavy metal contaminants from seeping into groundwater.
The EPA at the time was launching a new initiative, called ER3 — the “Environmentally Responsible Redevelopment and Reuse program.” Empire Canyon was the perfect pilot project. In exchange for voluntarily removing the tailings and agreeing to redevelop the site using “green” building principles, the EPA agreed to release Talisker from further liability for environmental harm caused by the tailings.
Old Town residents were horrified at the thought of thousands of truckloads of contaminated soil coming past their houses. The city council and planning commission debated long and hard. But in the summer of 2006, a fleet of dump trucks, each pulling a “pup” trailer, worked 10 hours a day, six days a week, making 3,000 round trips to Richardson Flats. At a cost in the multiple millions of dollars, the Daly West site was clean of its burden.
On Earth Day 2007, leaders from the EPA, Park City, Talisker and Athens Group, as well as Utah Governor Jon Huntsman, Jr, gathered at the site to celebrate the nation’s first ER3 project. “Empire Canyon will be a success story of restoring contaminated properties back into community assets,” EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson told the crowd.
Now, as the Athens Group starts construction, it will incorporate promised “green” features in the design. Wetlands will be constructed below the hotel to manage storm water runoff and trap any remaining contaminants. The hotel will buy “Blue Sky” credits to partially power the Montage with clean wind power. Energy-efficient lighting will be used. The swimming pools will use alternatives to chlorine. Twenty-eight hundred acres of Empire Canyon will be preserved as open space to offset the density of the hotel.
A century ago, no one thought about the environmental consequences of what they were doing. Mining ravaged hundreds of sites in the mountains around Park City.
Nowhere was that more apparent than at the Daly West site.
Until now.
Longtime Park City Magazine contributor Larry Warren is a Park City freelance writer and filmmaker and author of “Park City, Mountain of Treasure.” He’ll miss the old tailings pile, where he used to make a few powder turns.
Your comments may be edited for brevity and foul language.