Ophir and access
I'll toss in what I can here. As to Leo and Julie being the most vocal, it’s because they own most of the land up there, there is very little BLM. Jacob City up to the Kennecott property over the hill is owned by the Ault’s. Also, a lot of Ophir, up Lion Hill, and quite a few stretches over in to the old Mercur site are owned by the Ault’s as well. They have been very lenient in access to most all of the sites, but it is as bad as they say and worse. GRE has done two major cleanups in Jacob city - Fences run over, trash dumped (like washing machines and rolls of carpet etc...) and its still in crap condition. The Ault’s also faced serious litigation in the 90s when that ignorant scout leader decided to send all his little scouts into a mine when he had no idea how to explore it safely. In that case what could have been a great learning experience turned into a near tragedy. OGM came in and closed the site without permission, it has since been dug into and reopened, but it is very unsafe in the entrance now as the digging has been done by hand by people who are not miners and don’t know how to correctly shore or set up the area.
Other sites owned by the Ault’s are the "Green Eyed Monster" cave, the 7 gold mines up on the ridge between Silverado and Mercur. And a lot of the land up and around the lion hill area. Even right in town, people have come up and broken windows and stolen property out of the mine equipment houses.
They also haven’t had a lot of support in doing any trail work or much respect shown for the sites that are left out there. A lot of the access roads to Jacob City have fallen into disrepair since the "reclamation" out there. No mines, no need to maintain the roads.
Additionally the EPA has come in and forced “Eureka-like" repairs on some of the tailing piles in the center of town. Julie and her family sent out quite a few informational bits on this looking to help stop the EPA from doing unnecessary and damaging work on her property, however, she said that no one, aside from GRE Inc. had any interest in trying to help.
As of now, there is a developer who is looking to open up one of the canyons into 500k-1.5mil housing, if this happens the town will be pretty much dead as a ghost town and will become a yuppie-ville.
The rest of the mines will be closed and there will be no trails out there, only no trespassing signs put up by people who can afford to enforce them.
From my point of view, it basically comes down to the same battle that U4WDA has been fighting, there is a lot of work to be done, however, no one wants to do anything until it directly affects their recreation, and at that point, most really don’t want to do anything except for whine a little bit about how they don’t have access to trails that used to be open.
Sorry about the rant… anyway, GRE has carte blanche on the trails and mines in Ophir canyon, Jacob City and any other property that is Ault owned. If you have a trail that you would like to hit, let me know, I would be happy to arrange a time to go up with you. We are heading up there on July 2nd to do some photo-documentation, if you’re interested in coming along, shoot out an email and I can link you to the details…
Hope that was at least a little helpful… feel free to disregard my rant…
