Backyard in Montana

Early spring, March I think, in a strange week of warm sunny weather that melted all our snow. It hit 90 that week...and then -30 a few weeks later. This used to be the site of a mining town that had over 30,000+ living here year around in tents. Now, maybe 200 people live here. Jefferson City, Montana. We have a bar, and a gold mine, that still washes all their shit down the creek.

Adding a bit of detail about the gold mine, due to interest
Almost all modern industrial scale gold mines use a form of cyanidation mining. They are extracting very very small amounts of gold, from very large amounts of rock. Something to the order of 1oz of for for 100 tons of rock. Obviously they have to extract this rock from the 'pit'. In order to keep the pit clear of water, they must pump out all the rainwater that would collect in the pit, and keep it in ANOTHER pit. The deep earth and stone from the digging pit also contains a LOT of heavy metals, and other dangerous substances that leech out into the water...so the water holding pit is quite toxic. In fact, animals or birds that land in it or drink out of it usually die on the spot.

Once the rock is extracted, it must be ground into fine particles, and is moving to a leeching pond(these can be up to 160 HA in size). In order to extract the gold from ground up mixture, millions of liters of water containing heavy concentrations of cyanide are pumped through the pond A 'protective layer' of what is essentially a plastic tarp is laid down as a liner to prevent escape of the toxic slurry.

here is an abandoned pit mine in Butte, MT, in which the original extraction pit has been allowed to fill up with water, because the mining company that ran it went bankrupt (after transferring most of their assets out of the country)

Montana is home to more federal Superfund sites than any other state. It's far too expensive and vast of a problem for anyone to deal with. If maintaining the ecological safety of the site had been a priority(it never is), the mine probably wouldn't have been able to afford to exist. Some 35% of all the copper used in the united states came out of this mine...many of the wires that are transferring the electricity we are using at this moment to have this discussion came from that gigantic hole in the earth, which actually used to be a mountain.

At any rate, after as much gold is able to be extracted from the leeching slurry as possible...they pump off the water to be processed (take the gold out), and haul the now deadly mine tailings to dump sites nearby where the local residents don't have enough political and economic clout to fend them off. They are piles in huge mounds, and continue to leech their poisonous solubles into the surrounding watershed every time it rains.

But at least we have gold. Well...somebody has gold.