COPPER MOUNTAIN, B.C. — The explosive detonated, sending a shower of rock and a cloud of burnt-orange smoke across the terraced mountainsides.
Here, among the northern reaches of the Columbia Basin, humanity’s knack for the extraction of Earth’s resources was on full display.
The sound of the explosion quickly reached the onlookers: children and spouses of this mine’s workers, tucked behind a rope fence to see the promise of modern-day mining.
It was part of the annual celebration of Hudbay Minerals’ Copper Mountain Mine. For decades, the mine’s operators have torn apart the mountain top, scratching, gnawing and blasting to get at what’s below.
The copper is among the same metals that drew settlers to this region in the late 19th century. Now, the copper here and across the West could help the world electrify everything, cast aside fossil fuels and stave off the worst effects of climate change.
But this isn’t so simple.
Globally, about 22 million metric tons of copper are mined each year. The metal has long been treasured for its electrical conductivity in consumer products. For the whole world to run on power from solar and wind, with battery storage and electric vehicles, by the year 2050, we’d need to claw up four times that much of this one metal each year, according to Adam Simon, a professor of Earth and environmental sciences at the University of Michigan, and Lawrence Cathles, at Cornell University.
Copper Mountain’s projected production is about 45,000 metric tons of copper annually for the next decade. The company has plans to expand the mine to keep the operation active for longer. Mitsubishi, a partial owner of the mine, will receive the copper for its products.
Simon’s projections suggest humanity would need to open 56 more mines like the one at Copper Mountain, wherever possible, each year to meet demand. (Estimates vary for how many mines are needed to transition off fossil fuels.)
The daunting proposition of extracting enough metal to meet the needs of an electrified world is complicated by the inherently dirty nature of mining.
Mining creates toxic waste, and these minerals are largely found in communities that have been repeatedly exploited over natural resources. In the case of Copper Mountain, two massive dams hold back the mine’s tailings from flowing to downstream communities.
For the more than 150 years since colonization, the Columbia Basin has provided a bounty of resources: hydroelectric dams, vast forests and even cool water for the development of nuclear weapons at the Hanford site.
A legacy of pollution has been left behind. On the upper Columbia, a beach was named for its “black” sand after millions of tons of slag from a smelter were released in the river — now part of a U.S. Superfund site.
To support a cleaner future with less fossil fuels, these resources are again being tapped. Some worry history will repeat itself.
“You think we would’ve learned from hydro and the impacts of stopping or eliminating our salmon runs. We’re trying to work on getting all that back,” said Jarred-Michael Erickson, chairman of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, 12 tribes whose traditional lands encompass this transboundary region. “Anytime you’re putting solar farms somewhere, or are mining, what tribe or what First Nation are those coming from?”
Erickson says cooperation among state, federal and tribal governments could even expedite the approval of clean energy projects.
“I know the rush. I understand the projections. I understand where the climate is going and how a degree or two can significantly impact us as a planet,” he continued. “There’s a smarter way to do it and still do it quickly.”
The boom and the bust
A crowd in downtown Princeton this past summer erupted in cheers as Gord Frost, Copper Mountain Mine’s general manager, slapped a pie tray of whipped cream in the mayor’s face.
Wiping away the goop, Mayor Spencer Coyne smiled and laughed. He had stepped up to compete with the company to raise money for “Mining for Miracles.” The nearly $40,000 donated by community members goes to B.C. Children’s Hospital Foundation.
This was a mining town’s boom time.
Rows of hot dogs and burgers sizzled on the grill. Nearby, kids learned how to operate heavy machinery and dug for coins in a sandbox among the many interactive activities set up by Hudbay.
Much of Rose Holmes’ family works in the mine.
Holmes drives the haul trucks that can carry 220 metric tons, her dad is a crusher, her brother an equipment operator. Her mom joined the mine a few years ago, too.
They are good-paying jobs close to home — and can be hard to come by.
Copper Mountain Mine’s 600 employees make about $70 million annually, with earnings into the six figures, according to 2023 data.
Princeton officials tally the mine’s annual economic impact in the Similkameen Valley at about $140 million. This includes buying equipment and maintenance services from local businesses, donations to nonprofits and other interactions with the valley’s economy.
Copper Mountain promises economic and social benefits at least through 2041, when the mine may cease operation, Hudbay says.
“I was just doing small jobs here and there, minimum wage jobs,” said Holmes, a member of the Upper Similkameen Indian Band, a First Nation government in British Columbia. “My oldest brother, who passed away, Leon, he really pushed me to go out there” to Copper Mountain.
“Days before I got the job, he was bragging about me going,” Holmes said. “When I got up there, and I went to introduce myself and some of the guys were like, ‘I already know you’re Leon’s little sister.’ ”
For many, working in the mine is a source of pride, as it has been for generations.
It hasn’t always been this way, like when copper prices took a nosedive in 1996 and the town lost nearly 300 families after the mine shuttered.
But this boom time is hardly over.
Copper Mountain expansion
The biggest threat of mining here isn’t in the blasting and grinding of rock — it’s in what’s leftover.
Ore from Copper Mountain is ground into sandlike particles and then mixed with water to form a slurry.
Copper is attracted to air particles, so bubbles are blown into the frothy mixture. The copper floats and the rock sinks. Copper concentrate is separated from the waste and water and shipped to Japan to be smelted by Mitsubishi.
The copper is processed into semiconductors, automobiles, solar panels and more.
The finer waste at the mine, known as “tailings,” is moved to a pond that fills a natural valley from wall to wall, beaming bright turquoise.
Two dams on either side of the valley hold back 230 million metric tons of the waste, according to Hudbay. The main risk of the tailings dam is collapse.
The tailings pond has an annual probability of failure of 0.45%, according to an analysis by Steven H. Emerman, one of the authors of “Safety First: Guidelines for Responsible Mine Tailings Management.” Emerman was contracted by the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation and Conservation Northwest, a nonprofit group.
If the annual probability of failure were 1%, and there were 100 tailings dams, that would mean the most likely outcome would be one failure per year, Emerman said.
According to most U.S. and Canadian guidelines for tailings dams, the maximum annual probability of failure ought to be less than 1 in 1 million, according to Emerman.
A separate study, by Lynker Technologies and also contracted by the groups, found that if just 40% of the waste from the tailings pond were released, a debris flow within 90 minutes would cover parts of Princeton in over 30 feet of sediment. The flow would proceed down the Similkameen Valley, the report found, covering the Washington border with about 6 feet of sludge 24 hours after the dam failed. Debris would continue to flow into the Columbia River, according to the report.
The state Department of Ecology’s Dam Safety Office reviewed the methods used in the Lynker report and found that it followed industry standards and practices.
In 2023, then-Ecology Director Laura Watson wrote British Columbia to request an environmental review of an expansion at Copper Mountain, citing concerns over the effects of a dam collapse.
Leaders of the Colville Tribes are among those worried a dam failure would harm not only people but ecosystems that support salmon runs. The tribes have spent millions restoring and preserving runs in the Columbia’s dramatically altered landscape.
The mining company has yet to respond to requests from Colville leaders for additional tailings safeguards, according to the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation. Colville leaders worry more extreme weather events and other climate impacts will heighten the existing risk.
Hudbay plans to increase the production at Copper Mountain within the next five years and reopen a dormant pit flanking the Similkameen. Company officials hope to find 14 more years’ worth of metals.
The company, through a spokesperson, wrote in an email that the Copper Mountain “tailings management facility” is safe and “we do not agree with the results of (Emerman’s) report,” citing further reviews by British Columbia.
The 2014 breach at Mount Polley Mine’s tailings dam provides a stark example of what can go wrong. The copper and gold mine near Likely, B.C., operated by Imperial Metals, released enough contaminated tailings and water to fill about 10,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools, according to estimates from the province. Lead, arsenic, nickel and copper were found in the tailings.
Forests and stream floodplains were coated with a layer of brown tailings.
Researchers have found that even 10 years later, an affected creek continues to release pulses of contaminated tailings into a nearby lake, which is an important spawning and nursery habitat for Fraser River sockeye.
Hudbay says it adheres to the laws and regulations that were “enhanced after the unfortunate Mount Polley incident.”
B.C.’s Ministry of Mining and Critical Minerals said in a statement last week an expansion at Copper Mountain would be reviewed for environmental impacts, necessary protections and oversight and would be assessed as part of a permitting process. The ministry also said state Ecology and Environmental Protection Agency staff as well as representatives from local government, the Upper Similkameen Indian Band, the Lower Similkameen Indian Band and others would be invited to participate in a mine review committee.
Washington ecology Director Casey Sixkiller said an expansion at Copper Mountain would make its tailings dams among the largest in the world, and that alone should result in a thorough, transparent environmental assessment.
“When we think about where there has been a more recent example of a tailings dam failure, it is in British Columbia — so it’s not a hypothetical,” Sixkiller said. “We have a historical event from which to learn lessons and apply them to any future expansion of existing facilities.”
A valley’s lessons
Ulxanica (ul-hah-nitza), also known as Larry Kenoras, lives downstream of the mine, near Keremeos.
He was there in the town of Likely after the Mount Polley disaster. It was unusually silent in the aftermath. There were no singing birds, or buzzing mosquitoes along the shore, he recalled.
Now, light raindrops pattered on his downy puffer coat as he guided his four-wheeler up his axle-twisting gravel drive. Tucked behind the bend was a vast clearing where a wood-paneled home sat between two looming peaks. Lacy fog hung around the ponderosas’ crowns on hillsides where gray-speckled Appaloosas grazed.
“I’m of the land,” he said, sipping coffee at his kitchen table. “I don’t follow the colonial mentality of ‘This is mine.’ This is ours. It’s going to take care of me, it’s going to take care of you.”
A veil of clarifying sagey steam from wormwood filled the kitchen as he spoke. He opened a binder to pull out a silk-screen map given to his great-grandfather Francois Timoyakin, labeled “Similkameen Indians.” The identified tract of land spanned about 1,100 acres, mostly of rocky hills.
His home today sits within that plot.
But his family’s ties to this place go far deeper than when settlers drew up this map. This place was a summer camp and fasting camp, where the saskatoon and chokecherries are plentiful. Bitterroot and other bulbs were not far away.
Ulxanica said his people have always been among the caretakers of nearby Kłlilx’w, a honeycomb of yellow, green and blue-hued pools filling the outline of a larger lake, Ulxanica said.
The lake is a part of the creation story and the language, Ulxanica said; it’s sacred medicine. It has been visited by other tribes to treat internal illnesses or skin problems, he said.
For the people indigenous to this place, the mineral-rich region continues to provide healing, Ulxanica described.
Over the years, settlers and new mines have come and gone. But in the old wood buildings clinging to cliff faces and looping rolls of rusting cables set deep in the woods, their memory and waste still litter the landscape.
“We all got shafted,” Ulxanica said — animals, plants, the settlers of Canada and the U.S., and Native people.
Today, environmental groups estimate there are more than 50 abandoned mines in the Similkameen watershed.
If something were to go wrong, or a mine runs out of valuable ore, everybody can and usually does move away, Ulxanica said.
Upper Similkameen band Councilor Mike Allison said he has seen impacts mining activity has had on the streams, lakes and trout of the region.
“This is our territory and this is where we live forever,” said Councilor Janet Terbasket, of the Lower Similkameen band.
“What people need to understand is, our community has to look forward for seven generations,” she continued. “And we have to try and keep our areas pristine, so not only our children’s children can enjoy what we have, but their children’s children’s children.”
Reporting for this project was supported in part by the Fund for Environmental Journalism of the Society of Environmental Journalists and EcoFlight, a nonprofit using small aircraft to provide an aerial perspective with a mission to educate and advocate for wild lands, watersheds and culturally important landscapes.
