Beyond the Fun; Reckoning with Durango’s History

Most of us live in the West because of the exceptional outdoor opportunities here, the vast areas of wild land, big mountain ranges, rivers, climbing cliffs, beautiful deserts and solitude. As time goes by certain towns have become centers for serious outdoor adventures, places like Moab, Utah, Durango, Colorado or Santa Fe, NM. While we enjoy these places, we might be mindful of their histories that were not always idyllic.

Today’s western economy increasingly revolves around outdoor recreation and tourism, largely clean industries with dispersed though not insignificant impacts. Thriving outdoor towns like Durango, Colorado and Moab, Utah used to be very small towns, dependent on mining and particularly uranium mining to create fuel for nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons.

North of Moab 16 million tons of uranium waste at the old Atlas Mill site has been under clean-up for the last 13 years. This huge pile of radioactive mill tailings (mine waste) regularly washed into the Colorado River which flows right next to the site on its way to provide drinking water to the biggest cities in the Southwest including Tucson, Las Vegas, Phoenix and Los Angeles.

Then there is Durango, Co, where a huge pile of uranium mine tailings loomed over downtown on the very edge of the Animas River until 1986 when the federal government moved the tailings away from the town and the river. Before then, clouds of dust from the tailings blew across the south side of Durango (the low income area) and the uranium mill beside the river dumped acidic radioactive sludge into the Animas where it flowed down into the Navajo Reservation and onto their crops, into their wells, and into their livestock.

Indeed studies done by the State of Colorado in the 1970s and later found high levels of radioactivity and various toxins in the Animas River and the San Juan River which it joins near Farmington, NM. The industrial waste from mines in the San Juan Mountains joined with the uranium mess to kill most of the micro fauna in the Animas, the food supply for fish.

In Durango and Grand Junction, Co, uranium mill tailings were used on road beds, to mix into concrete for house construction and for sidewalks. Much of this radioactive concrete has been cleaned up but not all of it. Naturally the tourism and economic development people in these towns don’t want to talk about this environmental history.

Towns like Durango have made a concerted effort to clean up these industrial waste sources and move on so everyone can be safe living in or visiting the town. More work needs to be done to control pollution from hard rock mines in the San Juans, work that may be compromised by Trump administration abandonment of pollution clean up and control nationwide as the Environmental Protection Agency is now run by the very industries it was established to regulate.

We all remember the Gold King Mine spill in 2015 that turned the Animas River orange for more than a week from Silverton on to Farmington, NM. That was a disaster caused by a private contractor to the EPA who was supposed to be cleaning up the permanent leakage of acidic effluent from an abandoned gold mine. The contractor breached a holding dam, letting loose decades of toxic waste. This sort of threat to the environment in one of the most beautiful areas of Colorado shows how past exploitation of the mountains can come to haunt and damage the current residents and users of the environment.

The May 28 edition of High Country News has an excellent article about the pollution of the Animas River over the last century by Durango native Jonathan Thompson. He goes beyond discussing the pollution of the Durango area and looks at how the Vanadium Corporation that had its uranium mill in Durango moved it to Shiprock, New Mexico (next to the San Juan River) on the Navajo Reservation and continued to pollute the San Juan River from there and sicken Navajo people. This sort of blatant act of environmental racism is all too common in the West.

Having said all of this, Durango today is a wonderful place to visit and a safe place to spend time. The multiple craft breweries, trails, rafting trips, bike paths, skiing and general fun must continue as they must in Moab. Yet while we enjoy these beautiful places, lets also remember history and keep our guard up against those like Trump’s team who would unleash new waves of pollution and sickness on behalf of the filthy industries who line their pockets and donate to their campaigns.