Holden, its mine and its village - Part 1: Mine history, legacy lingers at Holden Village

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7/28/2010 12:37:00 PM

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Standing on the west waste rock pile, with the old Holden Mine mill in the background, Norm Day, of the U.S. Forest Service, is the manager of the Holden Mine cleanup project. He has an extensive background with mining and has worked with the Forest Service for more than 30 years.
Photo by Les Bowen

The east waste rock pile rises above the buildings at Holden Village, as seen from houses perched north of the Holden Mine site. Howe Sound Company’s Holden Mine operated from 1938 to 1957 and was one of the largest copper mines in the U.S. The mining interests and townsite were deeded to the Lutheran Bible Institute and Holden Village incorporated in 1962 as a nonprofit and an interdenominational retreat center. Just as Holden Mine was the largest of its kind in the nation, Holden Village is the largest retreat center operating under a special use permit from the U.S. Forest Service.
Photo by Les Bowen

Holden, its mine and its village - Part 1: Mine history, legacy lingers at Holden Village

Erinn Unger
Staff Writer

Editor's note: This is the first installment of a three-part series looking at Holden mine, its cleanup and the impacts on Holden Village and Lake Chelan.

Norm Day, manager of the Holden Mine cleanup project, clicked his radio in a familiar routine, advising a disembodied voice that U.S. Forest Service vehicles are coming up. An all-clear crackled back as tires spat gravel.

"You wouldn't want to meet a Holden Village bus on these corners," he laughed, his cheeks lifting merrily under his baseball cap as he cranked the wheel.

The narrow gravel road ascended from the lake, climbing into the forest with help from an uncountable number of sharp switchbacks.

Those corners were scraped from the glacial till in the early 1930s by men with hand tools, dynamite and grit, to make way for trucks laden with copper and zinc, and more recently, buses running the circuit from Holden Village to Lucerne and back. Soon it will carry trucks again, this time loaded with equipment meant to return Holdem mine to the earth.

The Jeep bumps through forest torched during the 2007 Domke Lake fire. The trees are silver needles piercing the earth from below. Fireweed blooms in swaths along the road. Day waved to a bicycle rider, who smiled and waved back.

Suddenly, the village burst into view. Deer stood between clapboard buildings with peeling paint, chewing calmly. As a bell rang, people emerged into the bright morning, talking and laughing, their shoes puffing with dust as they moved through the center of the village to wherever the bell was calling them.

The retreat center is a tidy town of shingled houses situated a stone's throw away from the Holden Mine site, a short hike from the border of Glacier Peak Wilderness and a 40-mile boat ride north of Chelan. The mining interests and abandoned townsite were deeded to the Lutheran Bible Institute and Holden Village incorporated in 1962 as a Lutheran-based interdenominational renewal center.

Its buildings housed miners and their families while the Howe Sound Company's mine was in operation from 1938 to 1957. The village still plays host to miner reunions, along with thousands of guests each year who can attend various programs and retreats. Holden has a public school operated under Lake Chelan School District, a bookstore, a sauna and hot tub, a post office, a pool hall and a library with at least one special book in it: a short story written by Elizabeth Taylor about a pet chipmunk. The actress was at Holden in 1944 while filming "The Courage of Lassie."

The village operates under a special use permit from the Forest Service and does so sparingly, relying on volunteer manpower to keep the place running. The village uses wood for heat during the long cold season and runs off a diesel generator when Copper Creek grows too sluggish to operate the small hydroelectric power plant. Bowlers have to set their own pins at the village's bowling alley. There are no phones, no cell phone reception and no television, though there is a narrow band of Internet.

The porches of some houses sit high on a northern slope, looking down at the mine site where the men would go off to work. Tailings piles resembling crumbling pyramids are visible between treetops, with glacial Copper Basin crowning the view. Fifty-seven miles of underground tunnels are hidden in the mountains which cradle the place and cast it in nearly perpetual shadow during the winter.

From those tunnels came about 212 million pounds of copper, 40 million pounds of zinc, 2 million ounces of silver and 600,000 ounces of gold, according to the Forest Service website. The material was brought from the mine in five-ton buckets and trucked down the road to the lake. Then it was loaded onto barges, which chugged it down Lake Chelan and deposited it into a rail car, which then took the material to a Tacoma smelter. Despite that incredible process, Howe Sound made a profit of $800 million in today's dollars.

To produce the valuable materials, workers built a mill, which now looms over the area where Holden Village employees chop wood to burn during the winter.

Inside, workers operated machines that crushed the ore, added chemicals and then separated the copper and zinc from the waste rock using a flotation process. The extraction process mainly utilized organic compounds, making the mine a fairly environmental operation for its time, Day said, standing on a waste rock pile and looking down on the site.

The company did consider installing the mill at Lucerne and dumping its waste into Lake Chelan, but struck the idea when they saw the recreation and fisheries value of the lake. Despite this early environmental consciousness, Day said, "we're still left with a legacy."

A small hill of ore still sits inside the dilapidated structure, enclosed in a sagging fence which has seen too many heavy snows. Nearby, a pair of hikers stretched their legs past the main mine portal, enjoying the sunny morning.

Day yanked open the door at the portal. The darkness breathed, exhaling frigid, metallic air pulled in from shafts above. He shone a spot of light into the entrance, revealing aging wooden beams and stacks of plastic boats. The mine shaft flooded over the years and those working on the mine remediation project float down the shaft in the vessels, then scramble over temporary bulkheads until they can reach dry ground to do their work. Milky-looking, metal-laden water seeps from under portal's door and draws deer, who lap it up eagerly. The mine drainage, which runs alongside the dirt road to the portal, has high concentrations of iron, manganese, copper, zinc and aluminum, as well as lead and other metals.

The immense operation produced more than 8 million tons of tailings, the material left over after the removal of the precious materials. This toxic material now covers about 90 acres, or about 70 football fields worth of land near Railroad Creek, which runs through the site, past the village. The tunnels of the mine were stuffed with another 1.5 million tons of the material.

The tailings piles arch above the townsite - the largest measuring 120 feet in height. One is still held stable by the original toe dam constructed by the workers.

The three piles were covered in gravel during an interim action by the Forest Service and now sport a geometric pattern of vegetation to keep tailings dust from gusting through the village in yellow clouds. Windblown tailings are 18-inches deep in some areas, Day said, layered on the ground amongst the trees.

There are small forests of monitoring equipment too, taking samples from the ground water contaminated with heavy metals. Railroad Creek runs below the tailings piles after having been moved three times to make room for the mining operation. The first time was to put in saw mill and mine mill near the lagoon, in the western area of the site. Then the creek was moved again when construction began on tailings pile No. 2, then again to make more room for the waste.

It may move again.

For now, the water skirts the piles and flows orange with iron deposits to Lake Chelan. The rocks on the bank seem to glimmer bronze under the crystalline water. That water is laden with heavy metals, which have solidified the creek bed and reduced aquatic habitat.

Forest Service workers planted Alder trees along the banks, to shade the water and enhance the aquatic habitat.

"There was so much cementation of the creek bottom, that it didn't help that much," Day said.

According to a 1997 report from Ecology, iron staining can be seen five miles downstream. Then there's the threat of long-term erosion from the piles and damage from earthquakes.

"Results show the Holden site is having a devastating effect on the water quality and aquatic life of Railroad Creek," the report reads, adding that elevated levels of zinc, copper and iron have been recorded since the 1960s, along with low levels of fish and benthic invertebrates; the numbers of invertebrates dropped notably from more than 3,000 above the mine to 50 below and 361 where the creek meets the lake.

Above the mine and piles, six mine portals honeycomb the topography, called Honeymoon Heights. A ventilation shaft sits to the west of the main one, housing a mammoth fan.

For years, the fan in that portal produced a constant hum in the valley, Day said. When copper mining was no longer lucrative, Holden Mine was closed and the fan turned off, leaving the valley in a strange silence. The mining village fell into disrepair. Visitors to the ghost town threw rocks through the windows.

Years later, full panes of glass shine in the sun and hikers can fuel up at the freshly painted snack bar, which used to be the miners' soda fountain. Residents bed down in the miners' dormitories, with the bathrooms down the hall, and play Foosball where the men gambled. There are reminders everywhere that without this mine, Holden Village would not exist.

Residents gathered at the espresso bar one recent morning, which sits on a deck overlooking the village center. It is one thing, it seems, that is not a throwback to the mining era. A jovial man quizzed fellow coffee-drinkers on obscure words and their definitions, as a young woman in a knit cap pulled espresso shots into comfortable ceramic mugs.

However, the mining past is not far away. A hanging pot of geraniums only temporarily distracts the eye from the yellow tailings pile which looms in the distance. It's a disturbing, but familiar sight for villagers, year after year. It's a view that will not stay that way for much longer.

The next installment of the series will focus on the Holden Mine remediation project and its implications for Holden Village.

Contact Erinn Unger at reporter@lakechelanmirror.com or 509‑682‑2213.