Hello my friends! My name is Liam Fressie and I’ve recently begun my resource assistant internship program with the Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forest and Pawnee National Grassland. Here at ARP (Arapaho, Roosevelt, Pawnee), I’m working on special uses with the lands department of the United States Forest Service.

              Upon arriving, my first question was “what does special uses mean?”. Well, the National Forests belong to each and every citizen equally. However, as citizens, we also have certain rights and entitlements on this land, like the right to mining, prospecting, and recreating.

              Special uses deals with the cases where these two scenarios interact and overlap, asking the question “How can we assure citizens can safely express their rights to activities like mining, while also assuring that other citizens can still safely recreate on the land in which they have a right too?”. To meet the needs of perspective miners while also keeping the forest safe for recreators, conditions are developed and implemented to ensure that the miners operate safely, while also protecting the area to be used by recreators.

              In my first few weeks here, I’ve been familiarizing myself with the codes and laws that dictate the conditions we set and the decisions we make as an agency, such as the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the Forest Service Forest Plan. We also had the opportunity to go into the field and visit a private citizens mining claim to inspect whether these conditions and requirements for safe and responsible operation, were being met.

              We drove through miles of beautiful mountain passes until we came to an area known as Red Feather Lakes.  We pulled into a trail head parking lot and hiked roughly a mile to the remote crystal mining claim. Upon reaching the claim, I was surprised by the conditions I observed. When most of us think of mines, we think of underground tunnels and shafts, but I quickly learned that the majority of these prospecting claims were small operations that look more like the one you can see in the attached photo. Small holes from one to five feet deep, scattered on a ten-acre plot with only a hand full of people operating them. I learned that the smaller scale of the operations is a result of one of the many sets of conditions that regulate mining practices.

              Miners on these smaller claims have a responsibility to return the land they are mining on to the state in which they found it. This ensures that the land can still be used safely by recreators as well as mitigates the environmental impact that these mining operations have.

              I’ve really appreciated the chance to gain insight into how the needs and rights of all citizens are of equal importance, with no single group or activity being more valuable than another. While this policy may have been born out of pragmatism, I’m heartened to learn that there is federal policy in place that validates that importance of including and considering all people and perspectives.

Agency: U.S Forest Service

Program: Resource Assistant Program (RAP)

Location: Rocky Mountain Regional Office