The Siskiyou National Forest in southwestern Oregon isn’t the prettiest place in the world, according to Mike Lunn, former forest supervisor, but it grows on you. It has a thirsty, lonely feel to it, its vegetation calloused and jagged. Gnarled pine trees rise like bony arms from the banks of the green-hued Rough and Ready Creek. Firs and cedars slant down the mountain slopes, neither towering nor draped in moss. Manzanita grows rampant, curling up two-toned from the earth—half is white as bleached bone, half is carnal crimson. High concentrations of metals in the soil discourage the growth of all but the most stalwart plants.

But it is this inhospitable soil that makes the Siskiyou region extremely valuable, both economically and biologically. Frugal endemic plants, some threatened or endangered, eke out a living from the soil’s high magnesium and low calcium content. Serpentine ridges spiked with gold and nickel jut from the 400-million-year-old mountains.

In 1993, a local miner, Walt Freeman, submitted a plan to the U.S. Forest Service to remove 5,000 tons of ore from thirty-five acres of his 4,360-acre mining claim on the Siskiyou, a move that would require the construction or reconstruction of eight miles of road so trucks could haul out dirt, which he would then test to determine the quality of its nickel content. If enough nickel was present, he wanted to proceed with the subsequent phases of a large-scale nickel mining operation.

The decision to approve or reject Freeman’s plan fell to Lunn. After examining the environmental impact statement, wading through a deluge of contradictory laws and regulations—including the 1872 Mining Law, the Endangered Species Act and the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act-and reviewing more than 5,000 letters from the public, Lunn handed down a decision in 1999 that was intended to strike a compromise.

Freeman would be allowed to remove 5,000 tons of ore from his claim for testing purposes, not by creating new roads, as he had proposed, but by helicopter. Sensitive species wouldn’t be threatened, Rough and Ready Creek wouldn’t be forded by twenty-five-ton ore trucks, there would be no danger of introducing root disease to the region’s Port Orford cedars, and Freeman would be permitted to test his claim. He would be able to proceed with the next phase of his mining plan if the ore proved to be economically viable.

The decision left no one satisfied. Environmentalists complained because Lunn didn’t reject the mining plan outright. And Freeman, incensed by the cost of sampling by helicopter, decided to sue the Forest Service in a federal takings lawsuit-to the tune of $600 million.

In thirty-two years with the Forest Service, Lunn worked in nine national forests in nine states. His assignments included the Targhee National Forest in Idaho, the Bridger National Forest in Wyoming and the Tongass National Forest in Alaska. Lunn, now retired, says that of all the forests he saw in his career, the Siskiyou stands out.

“I’ve never been anywhere that had the richness of resources that we were faced with there,” he says. “And it’s not the spectacular beauty you get in some of the mountain ranges; it’s the uniqueness and the rarity. You just don’t find those kinds of combinations of plants and soils that come together on the Siskiyou. It’s such a special place.”

However, the Siskiyou is not pristine. Since the gold rush of the early 1900s, mining activity, logging and road building have scarred the landscape. The fire that swept through southwestern Oregon in 2002 burned a half-million acres of forest, much of it in the Rough and Ready Creek watershed, where Freeman’s claim lies. Hundreds of small-scale mining claims smatter Forest Service maps. So why, Freeman wants to know, is there such a fuss over his proposal to haul out a bunch of dirt?

Freeman’s mining claim dates back to the early 1940s, when his parents moved to southwestern Oregon hoping to strike gold. After World War II, when the federal government subsidized efforts to stockpile chromium for the cold war, his family took up the cause. “That’s when I cut my teeth in the mining business,” Freeman says. “I started when I was six years old.”

His parents never made it big on gold or chromium, but Freeman inherited their dream and earned a mining degree at the Colorado School of Mines. When he and his father discovered that the red pebbles littering their claim contained high concentrations of nickel, Freeman finally saw profit potential.

Freeman’s plan was to extract the ore, essentially surface dirt containing chromium and iron as well as low-grade nickel, and to process it into stainless steel, worth about $800,000 a ton. But instead of spending his days in the mountains turning red dirt into green cash, Freeman is spending his time and money in court.

“I’m well beyond frustrated,” Freeman says. “Frustrated happened a long time ago.”

Freeman is upset that the Forest Service took six years to hand down a decision about his proposed mining plan. He is livid about the cost of the helicopter sampling. And he thinks it’s ridiculous that he has to prove the viability of his claim before he can launch the full-scale mining operation.

“Do I really look that stupid? Would I spend the kind of time, money and energy that I have if it was not going to make money? If the project is not economically viable, it won’t happen. Nobody can go out and raise money and do a mining project that’s going to lose money,” Freeman says.

“The Forest Service doesn’t have any right to determine whether I have an economically viable mine. Economics is not their determination. It’s none of their business. Their business is to make sure that no undue environmental degradation takes place to the surface resources. Pure and simple.”

Lunn explained that he couldn’t reject the mining proposal outright because the 1872 Mining Law guarantees Freeman’s right to proceed with his mining venture if it is profitable.

“He’s required under the mining law itself to be able to demonstrate certain economic characteristics of his operation in order to show that he’s actually got a valid claim,” Lunn says. “In the mining law, it says that in order to be valid, a prudent man-it’s called ‘the prudent man test’-a prudent man should have the opportunity or the ability to make a reasonable profit on it.”

Lunn wasn’t sure that Freeman could make a reasonable profit on his mining operation. At the time of Lunn’s decision, the quality of the ore had yet to be determined. And after a local smelting plant closed down, it was uncertain where Freeman was going to take the ore for processing.

“The risk we had was, OK, what if he goes up there and brings out this 5,000-ton sample and then can’t do anything with it? We’ve got those roads up there forever. Because they don’t go away in that country. You so totally change the character of the landscape when you punch these roads into them,” Lunn says.

What worried Lunn most about the creation of new roads was the potential to introduce a root disease to the native Port Orford cedars in the Rough and Ready Creek watershed. The disease has decimated cedars in the surrounding areas. “We would have done just almost anything to keep from having to do something that would have threatened that drainage with root rot,” Lunn says. “You build roads in there, you’re almost guaranteed that at some point in time you’re going to get the introduction of it.”

Lunn was trying to come up with a decision that recognized Freeman’s rights under the mining law and also protected the surface resources of the Siskiyou region.

“I looked at that as a good decision because even though it was tremendously expensive, the fact is, the whole damn thing’s expensive. And so, if it costs a couple million dollars to fly that sample out, if he can’t recover those costs up there over the long term-a couple million dollars is piddly in those mining operations,” Lunn says. “I think we came up with a solution to a really complex problem that could have worked for everybody.”

At the same time, it was difficult to weigh the region’s economic potential against its biological value.

“It’s the kind of thing you can’t put a dollar amount on. I knew how much it would cost him if he built roads, and I knew how much it would cost him if he had to haul it out with helicopters, but how do you put a value on what it’s worth not to have Port Orford cedar root rot in there, or what it’s worth to protect some of these just amazing species of plant and animals that you’ve got in there?”

Lunn paused. “You know it’s priceless. But yet you’re asked to make some economic assumptions, and all you can do is show what it costs to do something. You can’t show the cost of what you’d give up.”

The tiny towns of Cave Junction, Takilma and O’Brien that border the Siskiyou National Forest seem unwilling to give up anything for Freeman’s mine. Neighbors are concerned about the noise and dust that the operation would generate. Small-business owners wonder whether the jobs created would offset the loss of tourist dollars. And environmentalists cite the lengthy list of potential direct and indirect effects of mining on one of the world’s most biodiverse temperate forests.

Barry Snitkin has worked with the Siskiyou Regional Education Project for more than ten years. Based in Takilma, the group spearheaded community opposition to Freeman’s mining proposal.

“Freeman has low-grade nickel in the middle of a botanical wonderland,” Snitkin says. “Because of the serpentine, because of the millions of years of evolution, there’s hundreds of rare plants, endemic plants that grow nowhere else in the world. In fact, scientists are almost literally watching the different plants grow.”

Snitkin says that holes from old mining ventures already mar the Rough and Ready Creek watershed. The roads punched into the forests fifty years ago have not disappeared. “You see that beautiful, clear water down there?” he asks, looking at the Illinois River flowing behind his home. “Mining doesn’t always leave water like that. You’ve probably seen photos from rivers around the country, or reports about the amazing amounts of mining. Places where the fish populations are wiped out, or water becomes too toxic to drink. Well, I kind of like my water clean.”

“Water’s not meant to be a toilet. It’s meant to be clean, pure, so people can drink and swim,” Snitkin says. “My opinion is that clean water is more valuable than nickel.”

Lunn says that despite the community opposition to Freeman’s proposal, public opinion didn’t hold much sway in his decision-making process.

“There were very few, very few, people who came forward in support of Walt Freeman,” Lunn says. “For the people that I heard from or knew of, the public opinion was overwhelmingly opposed to it, but it really didn’t influence the decision because that’s not the way it works.”

The way it works, he says, is within the legislative framework of federal laws and agency regulations. Although Lunn’s 1999 decision tried to reconcile the 1872 Mining Law with conservation laws, Freeman felt cheated.

Freeman is suing the Forest Service under the provisions of the Fifth Amendment, which states that a citizen must be compensated for property taken by the government. He charges that the agency has essentially taken his property by impeding his ability to mine his claim.

But Lunn insists that his decision did not take Freeman’s nickel, because it permits the miner to go ahead with his sampling-in a way that doesn’t endanger sensitive species.

“He had talked all along that if we didn’t allow him to do what he was asking to do, it was going to be the taking of his right to operate. And that was one thing that we were really careful not to do,” Lunn says.

Freeman’s nickel mining operation on the Siskiyou National Forest is on hold. According to Roger Flynn, attorney for the Western Mining Action Project, the takings lawsuit will not challenge Lunn’s 1999 decision to sample only by helicopter, but it will determine whether Freeman has property rights to the minerals within his claim, and if so, whether they have been taken by the government. If Freeman wins some money from the suit, Flynn says, it becomes even less likely that he will ever scrape the nickel-rich earth out of the Rough and Ready Creek watershed.

“The question that you face every time you come up against one of these situations is, What is the proper balance in this situation?” Lunn says. “Part of the problem with mining and the minerals industry is the fact that sometimes minerals occur in the places that people really don’t want them to be dug up. But that’s where they are.”

“I think you have to follow the law, and you just have to work through some really hard problems sometimes. But one of the things I used to tell a lot of folks is I’m glad I don’t have to get up every day and figure out what the best answer is, because I’ve got a lot of laws and regulations and plans that have been accomplished to kind of give me some guidelines. And then you get down to where you have to make those hard decisions on a particular activity on a particular piece of land,” he says. “We’ve got a couple hundred million people that we work for. It’s not an easy job, and yet it’s so damned important. If people didn’t care so much, there wouldn’t be all this hullabaloo going on all the time.”

For the time being, the Rough and Ready Creek runs clear. On its banks, carnivorous cobra lilies lure insects into their sun-streaked leaves and drown them in pools of nectar. In the forests of pine, fir, redwood and cedar that spill down the slopes of the watershed, Siskiyou mountain salamanders forage for insects. And in the dusty surface of rust-colored soil, choked with nickel and magnesium, some of the most adaptive plants on the planet stretch their roots and grow.

For more information about mining at Rough and Ready Creek, contact the Siskiyou Project.