Transcripts

CATHERINE WINTER: The city of Coleraine on the East end of Northern Minnesota's Mesabi Range is unmistakably a mining town. An enormous red hill rises up behind the houses and shops. It looks like a butte, but it's entirely human-made-- a pile of rock and dirt dug from the mines around the town.

Cavour Johnson is a dentist who grew up in Coleraine. He remembers that the house he grew up in started out white, but it turned pink from the red dust of the mines.

CAVOUR JOHNSON: And at night, I can hear the trucks hauling ore and all the machinery working. And I suppose, at first, you'd think that might be something that would keep you awake at night, but actually had a rather pleasant sound to it. And of course, now you don't hear anything. It's as quiet as-- [CHUCKLES] as any rural community.

CATHERINE WINTER: On a spring afternoon, Johnson walks down a red path and turns to climb up a grassy hill. From the top, a huge pit stretches for miles to the left and right, and perhaps half a mile across. In some places, trees have sprung up on steep slopes. In others, shear walls plunge down hundreds of feet. The pit has begun to fill with water.

CAVOUR JOHNSON: And you can't really see the end of it. See that narrow channel down there? It'll continue beyond there quite a ways. Again, you have to remember that almost every community between here and Keewatin has one of these in their back yard, all filling with water.

CATHERINE WINTER: These pits stretch in an almost unbroken line for about 75 miles from Bovey to Babbitt. It's estimated that mining companies have dug up or piled rock on top of 100,000 acres in Minnesota. That's an area three times the size of the city of Minneapolis. Many residents want something done with the land, but they also want to make sure it could be used for mining again. Johnson sits on a committee that's working on a land use plan.

CAVOUR JOHNSON: I tend to lean towards recreational use more than anything. But again, because the communities need something other than tourism, I would like to see some commercial, like, an RV park here. Even residential on some areas is conceivable.

CATHERINE WINTER: It's probably not possible to build houses right on the edges of the mine pits. The pit walls might give way and dump the buildings into the water. But Itasca County zoning officer Terry Greenside believes houses could be built with views of the pits.

TERRY GREENSIDE: Some of the highest points in Itasca County are up on the tops of these made mountains. It's kind of like overlooking the Grand Canyon. This is the closest to Grand Canyon we're gonna have until the glaciers come back.

I suppose it's, you know, kind of in the eye of the beholder, but there are some very beautiful scenic overlooks on these things with the different colors of soil that are exposed in the banks and the different colors of water that are in the different pits-- from deep blue to almost an emerald green in some areas. They're quite pretty, I think.

CATHERINE WINTER: Some people already use the pits for recreation. The Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation Board, or IRRRB has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars from taconite taxes building boat launches and beaches, reforming land, and planting more than a million trees. The DNR stocked some pit lakes with fish, some people canoe or snowmobile or ride three-wheelers around the mine pits. Terry Greenside hopes for both recreational and commercial development. He says, decades of mining have left behind an infrastructure businesses could use.

TERRY GREENSIDE: We've got access to major power lines running through this area. We've got railroad access that parallels the mines from one end to the other. We have major highway arteries. We have communities-- cities and communities-- from one end of the range to the other.

CATHERINE WINTER: So far, only a few attempts have been made at commercial development. Two cities have opened industrial parks on mining land, and in Chisholm, a pit lake has been used for fish farming. Supporters argue that it's a successful business in an area that needs industry, but it's run into trouble with the PCA for contaminating groundwater.

Recreational development has been less controversial and seems to be succeeding in some areas, such as the Cuyuna Range, about 50 miles Southwest of the Mesabi Range. On a sunny afternoon, Barb Grove, director of the Cuyuna Range Economic Development Corporation, drives into the Cuyuna Country Recreation Area, not far from Brainerd. The recreation area is a chain of pit lakes and natural lakes surrounded by tall hills covered in pines and birches.

BARB GROVE: Everything that you're looking at as we drive through this area is unnatural. There isn't a thing that was here 100 years ago. So as we go up on the mountain tops or we come down to the waters, none of this was here before. It was just very flat, boggy area until the mining came in.

Something as devastating as mining-- and we consider it so negative-- in fact, has created-- when nature has been allowed to take over-- has created an incredibly beautiful area that-- it's hard to say it, but is even more beautiful than it was before.

CATHERINE WINTER: The soil is different here than it is on the Mesabi Range. The pit walls slope more gently and trees have grown over more of the area. IRRRB and local organizations have spent more than $2 million developing scenic overlooks and boat landings. Grove says, hundreds of people camp here every weekend.

BARB GROVE: We have a very interesting client market here, and that is scuba divers. And we, in fact, have divers here all season of the year, even in the middle of the winter, when they dig holes in the ice and the divers go down, because the water is so pure and so clear. And also, because the forests were growing up on the sides of the mine pits as the water was coming up. And so you can go scuba diving in and among trees and forests underwater.

CATHERINE WINTER: Local officials want to keep the area undeveloped for outdoor sports, but they don't want to turn it into a state park because then, it could never be mined again. They're asking the state to create a new recreation area designation. A proposal to create the new designation is currently before the legislature.

Under that measure, the chain of pit lakes would be treated somewhat like a park, but it would still be possible for mining to return to the Cuyuna Range. I'm Catherine Winter, Maine street Radio, Grand Rapids.