SILVERTON, Colo. — Colorado’s San Juan Mountains are home to about 15,000 abandoned mines, according to Rory Cowie, the president and owner of Alpine Water Resources.
Several hundred of these abandoned mines are in need of a cleanup, which is something multiple federal agencies are working on. Cowie refers to these mines as “legacy mines”— mines that are no longer in use.
“They either have draining water that's of poor quality, or they may have a bunch of mine waste or tailings ... near them,” Cowie said. “And so, for the past 25 or 30 years, there's been efforts to clean up these mines, but there are a lot of them and it takes a lot of funding.”
But Cowie has a low-cost, natural solution in mind: the American beaver.
But be careful. As Ben Goldfarb writes Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, mountain lions look at newly dropped-off beavers the way that you might look at a cheeseburger. There is a video embedded.
