Up Sucker Creek in southwest Oregon, gold miners' rights collide with environmental realities

At 38 years old, clean shaven and well spoken, Clifford R. Tracy doesn't fit Hollywood's archetype of a wild-eyed and white-bearded gold miner. But Tracy is Oregon's top gold mining rogue to environmentalists -- and a champion for a contingent of gold miners who say regulators are trampling their long-held property rights. Last year, Tracy was convicted of illegal mining along Sucker Creek on U.S. Forest Service property in southwest Oregon, after he felled trees, dug mining pits and diverted a stream without permission. He spent 13 days in jail because he wouldn't agree to stop mining. In Jackson County jail he went on a hunger strike, the jail confirms, and says he lost 20 pounds." It wasn't that bad," Tracy says. "The food wasn't that great anyway." Now Tracy has applied to mine just downstream on Bureau of Land Management property next to the creek, which happens to be one of Oregon's top streams for wild coastal coho, listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. The showdown on Sucker Creek comes downs to a conflict between the General Mining Law of 1872, which helped settle the West by promising easy access to minerals, and modern environmental laws such as the Endangered Species Act, adopted 101 years later. It also spotlights the controversial roles of federal agencies that manage public lands...more