The Eagle Mine, located along Highway 24 just north of Red Cliff, is the site of two impactful events in Eagle County’s history: the emergence of a profitable mining operation in the 1870s, and the start of an ecological disaster that has been actively mitigated for almost four decades with no end in sight.

Either of these histories alone would be enough to warrant a site tour of the abandoned mine, but combined, they reveal how capital, environmental and national interests intersect in a living story that continues to impact the Eagle River watershed today.

The mine is on private property and is closed off to the public, but every two years the Eagle River Watershed Council leads a guided tour of the site. The paid tour enables attendees to walk among the remaining structures legally and learn about them from those who are directly involved with the sustained consequences of the site.

Members of the nonprofit were joined by representatives of the Environmental Protection Agency and property owner Paramount Global. Together, the group told the full story: How the search for gold led miners to discover zinc and lead deposits in the mountains, fueling a century of steady work and a neighborhood that rose to 1,000 miners in the small town of Gilman.

How deposits diminished, leading owner Gulf and Western Industries to abandon the property and turn off the electricity, disabling the pump system that kept Eagle River water from flooding the mines. How the Eagle River turned bright orange with mineral deposits from the mines, triggering an emergency response that has now consumed decades and tens of millions of dollars.

Cleanup efforts required the installation of eight bulkheads in the mine to regulate the water level and prevent mineralized water from seeping into the river, the consolidation of two ponds that the miners used to store tailings, or mine waste, and the installation of a water treatment plant to filter heavy metals out of the water before releasing it into the Eagle River. Without this intervention, the Eagle River would rapidly flood with minerals once again.

The treatment plant, which treats an average of 220 gallons per minute, is paid for by the entertainment company Paramount Global at a rate of nearly $1 million each year. It may seem odd that a company best known for its blockbuster movies and its ownership of CBS is on the hook for the environmental impacts of a long-shuttered Colorado mine, but it turns out it is more common than you’d think. Paramount Global has its own environmental department for handling similar liabilities taken on in large business mergers.

The liability of the Eagle Mine never left Gulf and Western, it was simply transferred as the company was absorbed by ViacomCBS, which renamed itself Paramount Global in 2022.

The tour included a stop at the treatment plant, where a representative from Paramount Global explained how the metals were separated from the water and condensed into blocks before being stored in a lined fill on site. There are around 20 years of room left in this fill, and once it is full a new one will be dug so that the process can go on, well, forever. There is also a chance that the metal will be able to be recycled if future demands and processes allow for it.

The Eagle Mine has been on the EPA’s list of Superfund sites since 1986, through which it receives federal oversight of water treatment and funding to perform additional cleanup projects. With the EPA’s support, the footprint of land impacted by mine waste has been reduced from two ponds to a single site in Maloit Park.

Since the cleanup of the first pond, vegetation has returned to the site, which is now so substantially restored that the property owner, Battle North LLC., is eying the site for residential, mixed-use developments. Additional remediation, such as bringing in 10 feet of clean soil cover, would have to occur before the area is deemed safe for sustained human occupation, but the fact that development is even a consideration attests to the environmental progress that has been made in the area.

Developers have also eyed the site of the mining neighborhood in Gilman, but for now the property remains under restricted access. It is a heavy price tag to bring the land to the level of “unrestricted use, unlimited exposure” required for many development opportunities, but one day the payoff might just be enough to entice someone to undertake the job.

The mine area itself is frozen in time, with rails, buildings and mine shafts looking dilapidated but stable at the base of the steep valley. Mining is some of the hardest work demanded of humans, but walking through the area, looking up at the homes of Gilman overhead, it’s easy to imagine the community that once worked, played and lived prosperously in the mountains.

There are no plans to alter the current state of the mining relics, and the site will remain under restricted access for the foreseeable future. Photographs are not allowed at the site to discourage trespassing, so those who are interested in setting eyes on the Eagle Mine will have the next opportunity to do so in two years time.

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