A mining company plans to bulldoze winter roads into the heart of the Yukon’s Three Rivers wilderness. This plan to save cash on a highly speculative uranium exploration play pre-empts the land use planning process and jeopardizes the future of the Three Rivers. Due to the extreme hazards of radioactive wastes from uranium mining, many jurisdictions have imposed moratoriums on uranium mining. In the Yukon, there has been no public debate on the impacts uranium mining.
On October 24, Vancouver-based Cash Minerals submitted plans to build a 289 km network of winter roads into and along the Wind River to access their multiple uranium claims in the Wind and Bonnet Plume watersheds. The Bonnet Plume is a designated Canadian Heritage River; the Wind River is one of the North’s finest wilderness watersheds supporting existing tourism businesses. For the past several years the mining company has used airstrips for access. Now they want to bulldoze winter roads along the valley bottoms and build a new airstrip beside the Wind River. The proposal will save the company some cash, while the public will be left to deal with the long term environmental fall-out.
The Cash Minerals plan side-steps the high conservation, wildlife and wilderness values of the Three Rivers region and grossly underestimates the environmental and socio-economic impacts of its proposed advanced exploration operations. In fact, the project review submitted by the mining company’s environmental consultants has only a few sentences on wildlife, mainly to list some of the game species in the area. Why should the public accept the prospect of permanent and transforming damage from a “temporary” land use permit?
The plan to build a network of winter roads in the Three Rivers watersheds in advance of land use and conservation planning has no merit. In three short weeks, the future of the Wind River could be determined by one Vancouver-based mining company aiming to convert the Three Rivers into a uranium mining district.
You can also send a fax with your comments to 867-996-4040.
Background Notes on the Winter Road Proposal
The Wernecke Winter Road Access Project entails building a 250 km winter road with more than 100 km along the Wind River, plus 39 km of additional new spur trails up tributary creeks, bulldozed with heavy machinery. The proposal includes clearing in riparian areas, close to 100 stream crossings including the Wind River, a new airstrip and six supply caches.
A Wind River winter road was built illegally for mining exploration in the late 1950s, and the scars are still evident today. Cash Minerals plans to use this old trail, and therefore is saying that the proposed new road is just an upgrade of the existing one. But much of the old trail is overgrown and the proposed winter road would open up new motorized access. The new road, if approved, would allow the company to transport heavy equipment, fuel and other supplies to its four blocks of uranium claims in the Wind and Bonnet Plume watersheds. In past years these mining claims have been serviced by air only.
For more insight into the Cash Minerals proposal, download the following document:
Cash Minerals Winter Road Proposal
(Acrobat [PDF] file, ~5.4 Mb)
Consider These Facts
The project review by the Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Assessment Board (YESAB) will be managed by the local Mayo Designated Office. The Three Rivers wilderness and the Bonnet Plume Canadian Heritage River are of territorial and national importance. Due to the strong and widespread public interest in conserving and protecting this region, the environmental review should also include screening by the Executive Committee of YESAB. YESAB should consider cumulative impacts, and the fact that this project would pre-empt the ongoing land use planning process.
The winter road proposal to access uranium claims in the Three Rivers:
- prejudices ongoing land use and conservation planning by attempting to gain a long term industrial land use permit;
- ignores the substance of conservation and wilderness values, and offers no mitigation for impacts on these values; dismisses the alternative of air-only access as “too expensive”
- fails to acknowledge the potential serious impact on other users of the watershed;
- includes scant information and analysis on significant environmental impacts that will likely result in long lasting or permanent environmental damage to the Wind and Bonnet Plume River region;
- provides inadequate and incomplete information on critical wildlife habitat and species, and ignores or underestimates the long term potential impacts on wildlife, especially on species such as woodland caribou, nesting birds and large carnivores;
- ignores the long term cumulative impacts of the winter road proposal, and side-steps the end use of the winter road, which is to develop uranium mining;
- presumes there is a public consensus for uranium mining in the Yukon in advance of any public debate on the environmental or human health impacts;
- ignores the importance of the existing wilderness tourism industry including businesses operating in these watersheds and the Yukon-wide benefits of outdoor recreation in the watershed;
- seeks to save the company cash by using roads instead of airstrips to take in supplies; while the company strives to save shareholder money, it is transferring the cost of the long term impacts to the public;
- will open up the region to more all-season motorized access;
- underestimates the visual (and noise) impacts of the caches and airstrips proposed right along the Wind River and will establish new routes that could evolve into permanent roads; ignores the long term visual scars from the original use of the Wind River Trail;
- does not indicate what “higher standard of care” will be used in the Bonnet Plume Canadian Heritage River watershed;
- underestimates the amount of clearing needed in the riparian areas along the Wind River and provides only general information on new road routes.
