Salt Lake Tribune

07.05.2008

Seeking legendary Montezuma treasure, In S. Utah, new case of gold fever

Article Last Updated: 07/05/2008 06:46:55 AM MDT

KANAB - In the latest "National Treasure" flick, Ben Gates goes to Mount Rushmore in search of Aztec gold.
In real life, Corey Shuman goes to Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in search of the same thing.
And he will be able to continue hunting there for Montezuma's rumored riches - now that the state has abandoned plans to seal off White Mountain east of Kanab to such expeditions. The closure was part of a wider effort to shut down nearly two dozen old mines in the southern Utah monument.
But the legendary Montezuma site has been spared - at least for now.
"Technically, we wonder if it's a mine at all," said Jim Springer, a spokesman for the state's Abandoned Mine Reclamation Program. "If the BLM wants to move forward, they can."
; That won't happen until a Bureau of Land Management engineer weighs in, according to Larry Crutchfield, the federal agency's spokesman for the monument.
"He'll evaluate the site with safety concerns in mind," Crutchfield said, "and then make some recommendations on what we can do."
; Shuman and his prospecting pals at Draper-based Gold Rush Expeditions hope the caves and shafts on White Mountain in Johnson Canyon never close to treasure seekers.
"The site should be left alone because it is a historical resource and the only one of its kind," Shuman said. "The work that happened out there literally emptied the town [Kanab] for a year. It is a huge chapter in the history of Kanab and Utah."
That history began in the 1920s when a drifter named Freddy Crystal showed up and claimed he had a map from a Mexican monastery that identified Johnson Canyon as the burial spot for Montezuma's lost treasures. (Some believe the Aztec ruler's riches were spirited out of Mexico City to keep them out of the hands of Spanish conquistadors.)
So, with shovels in their hands and gold in their eyes, Kanab residents flocked to White Mountain to hunt for the stash.
But they never found it. The gold fever cooled. Crystal vanished, and Kanab's residents drifted back into town.
Nearly a century later, Shuman still believes there may be something to the legend of the lost treasure - mainly because of the petroglyphs chiseled into rock panels in the region.
"There is a huge panel just outside the monument - [which] has some interesting markings on it - that has been translated and may point to White Mountain and the mine."
Shuman also noted Crystal's credibility got a boost when several caves were discovered sealed off with an ancient form of concrete. He said the concrete plugs also featured petroglyphs, possibly made by Aztecs.
Treasure or not, efforts are under way to list the site on the National Register of Historic Places - a move Shuman believes could help preserve the caves that honeycomb the sandstone mountain.
Count BLM archaeologist Matt Zweifel among the Montezuma mine's nonbelievers.
"It seems far-fetched," Zweifel said. "For the logistics alone, you'd need an army of hundreds of slaves, surrounded by soldiers, and [have to] march through the Southwest desert crossing the Grand Canyon and a bigger canyon in Mexico."
Zweifel doubts the inscriptions are in Aztec. But he understands the legend's lure.
"They were all digging like mad," he said. "Everybody wanted to be a millionaire."
And they still do.
"One guy contacted us," Zweifel said, "saying he knew where the treasure was and would split it 50-50 with the BLM if we'd help him dig it up."
The agency declined.
mhavnes@sltrib.com

04-03-2008

Want to find Aztec gold? Search soon
Montezuma's treasure has been rumored to be hidden deep in mines that'll be closed shortly

By Mark Havnes
- The Salt Lake Tribune
04/03/2008 10:41:45 AM MDT
KANAB

Sorry, prospective prospectors, but you'll have to bury those dreams of unearthing Montezuma's gold.

Land managers plan to close nearly two dozen abandoned mines on southern Utah's Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, including some shafts outside Kanab where residents used to hunt for the Aztec emperor's rumored riches.
Old mines pose safety perils. Curious kids and other explorers can get trapped, injured or worse. Some shafts contain lethal gases.
Douglas Powell, a geologist with the Bureau of Land Management, said the mines need to be closed to protect the increasing number of visitors who traipse through the 1.9 million-acre monument in Kane and Garfield counties.
Steve Fluke, an environmental scientist with the Utah Division of Oil, Gas and Mining, said crews could begin closing 22 mines in September at a cost of about $1,200 per site. They sometimes use backfill, masonry, stones or steel grates - which provide access for bats that frequent some of the caves.
The closures comply with a 1977 law that mandates shutting down abandoned mines by tapping coal royalties. In 2004, 46 mines were closed on the monument.
There are no active mining claims on the monument now, although BLM archaeologist Matt Zweifel said he still fields occasional inquiries from hopeful prospectors.
Conditions were much different a century or so ago. Starting around the 1880s, miners began probing these parts of southern Utah for copper, lead, manganese and coal.
Then, in the 1920s, a man named Freddy Crystal showed up, claiming he had a map that identified Johnson Canyon, east of Kanab, as the place Montezuma's treasures - said to have been spirited from Mexico to keep out of the hands of Spanish conquistadors - had been hidden.
Many residents caught gold fever and began burrowing into a mountain, creating what became known as Montezuma Mine.
The treasure hunters struck out and eventually lost interest. Now, those shafts are slated for closure.
Kane County resident Monte Chamberlain doubts the Montezuma Mine is a hazard and noted it remains popular with locals, including Boy Scouts.
"We never found gold there," he said, "but never lost a Scout, either."
mhavnes@sltrib.com

I'd like to thank Joe Baird for showing no bias in the article below... and also Mark Mesch, for encouraging him to get the other side of the story. This article ran in the Salt Lake Tribune on Monday, February 13th, 2006, and then was picked up by the Scripps Howard News Service in Washington DC.

Article Last Updated: 02/13/2006 1:10 AM MST

Regulators deal with mines left abandoned
From days past: Utah has between 17,000 and 20,000 of the dangerous shafts dotting the state

By Joe Baird
The Salt Lake Tribune

Imagine that the state of Utah is chock full of holes, thousands and thousands of them. And that each is a potential environmental or public safety hazard. Now imagine yourself a state or federal abandoned mine program regulator. This is your reality.
;Utah has anywhere from 17,000 to 20,000 old, abandoned hard rock mines, dotting the state from the west desert to the Wasatch to the Colorado Plateau. Most of them are remote and rarely encountered. But between what they can emit and what can happen to those who unwittingly enter them, regulators, environmentalists and academics see an increasing threat.
;"What we've got is a huge problem," says Terry Snyder, abandoned mines coordinator for the Bureau of Land Management Office in Utah.
; With his trusty pick and shovel, the hard rock miner stands alongside the cowboy on the short list of the West's iconic images. But those grizzled gold and silver prospectors, who toiled long before environmental regulations, also left behind a mess.
;Waters laced with lead, arsenic, zinc and other metals have seeped out of abandoned Rocky Mountain mines and into watersheds, crippling native fish habitat and, in some cases, threatening drinking water supplies. And abandoned dry mines have become a safety issue as the West's booming Sun Belt cities extend further into the desert, putting them into closer proximity with people, including small children.
;All across the West, states have teamed with the BLM, the Forest Service and the National Park Service in a multipronged effort to repair and stabilize the old mine sites. In Utah, the feds work with the state's Division of Oil, Gas and Mining, which receives a yearly stipend of $1.5 million in federal coal tax money. With most of the state's defunct coal mines remediated, that money can be spent on hard rock mines. The state, with its partners, already has closed up 6,000 to 7,000 hard rock mines. But the vast majority of the work remains in front of them.
; "Virtually every part of the state has been impacted by mining of some sort," says Mark Mesch, administrator for the state's abandoned mine program. "Anywhere you go, you can encounter an old mine. If you're out on your ATV [all-terrain vehicle], chances are you're on a mining road, and following it will lead you to an abandoned mine. There are a lot of them out there. What you have to remember is that, before 1977, no state or federal law really dealt with this problem."
;A new report, published by the University of Colorado-based Center of the American West, argues that the time has come to do more, citing the environmental impacts of acid draining from mines.
;The U.S. Bureau of Mines, the report says, estimates that about 40 percent of the waterways in the Western United States are contaminated by acidic mine drainage, while 180,000 acres of lakes and reservoirs are infected by abandoned mine runoff.
;"We must remember that all rivers contain some amount of minerals from natural resources," says the report, authored by Patricia Limerick, Joseph Ryan, Timothy Brown and Allan Comp. "But even if we lower our standards for what we call an impaired stream, we still come to the sobering realization that a great deal of wilderness, much of it located in national forests and other public lands, is partially or wholly spoiled for fishing and hunting and hiking."
;The report calls for the passage of so-called "Good Samaritan" legislation, which is currently winding its way through Congress and would ease the liability burden unwittingly written into the Clean Water Act, allowing conservation groups, nonprofit organizations and companies to conduct their own mine cleanups with much less of a hassle. A pilot program for that approach was launched in Utah, when Trout Unlimited, Snowbird and others teamed up with the Forest Service and got federal funds and a grant from the Tiffany Co. to clean up the cadmium, zinc and other contaminants seeping out of old silver mines in American Fork Canyon.
;"Our goal is to allow groups to clean up these sites without incurring serious liability," said Paul Dremann, vice president of conservation for the Utah chapter of Trout Unlimited. "What's going on right now is more about an EPA administrative position than the [Good Samaritan] legislation, but it's a good first step."
Utah has other abandoned mine sites with water issues, such as the Cottonwood Wash project outside Blanding, where the contamination issue is uranium. But in fact, the state has relatively few water problems compared to neighbors such as Colorado or Montana. Most of Utah's mines are dry, meaning the primary issue here - and the focus of the state's abandoned mine program - is safety. /> ;And what concerns abandoned mine regulators the most is high-growth areas, such as Washington and Tooele counties, where there are subdivisions in areas that used to be dominated by mining claims - and still house those remnants.
;"It's kind of frightening," said Mesch. "Because people want to live out in the country, development and mining history are coming face to face. I got a call from a St. George woman who said her son was playing in a mine shaft. We identified 512 mines in that 800-acre area. That's almost one mine per acre."
The staffers from the state's abandoned mine program identify and prioritize reclamation projects based upon the presence of roads, mines and population in a given area. At the top of the division's priority list now is an abandoned mining district near Fish Springs National Wildlife Refuge, along the historic Pony Express route - an area that features 362 sites, 900 mine shafts and lots of visitors in a 265-mile area.
But not everyone is thrilled with state and federal mine reclamation efforts. Corey Shuman, who owns an outfitter service that guides tourists through Utah's ghost towns and abandoned mine districts, says regulators are snuffing out the state's history and "throwing money at something that is not a problem."
Said Shuman, founder of Draper-based Gold Rush Expeditions: "What we preach is common sense. Not using common sense is how the majority of accidents occur. Most people take pictures, and don't go into a mine more than 20 feet. We've gone in about as far as you can go, and it's safe. The guys who built the mines made them structurally safe. There's not much danger of them caving in."
Mesch and federal mine remediation officials take a dim view of those kinds of assertions, and have circulated through Utah schools with an safety awareness program that they hope will deter curious kids - and their parents - from entering old mine shafts. Five people have lost their lives in abandoned mines in Utah since 1985.
Virtually every part of the state has been impacted by mining of some sort. Anywhere you go, you can encounter an old mine. . . . What you have to remember is that, before 1977, no state or federal law really dealt with this problem.