Representative Gael Tarleton (Democrat, 36th District) has just introduced a proposal in the Washington State House of Representatives to further restrict and regulate suction-dredge mining in our state's fish-bearing rivers and streams. The text of the bill can be found at:

http://apps.leg.wa.gov/billinfo/summary.aspx?bill=2579&year=2013#history

If you feel strongly about the issue, please send your written comments directly to Representative Tarleton (gael.tarleton@leg.wa.gov) within the next week because a hearing on the bill will occur by the end of January.

Hydraulic mining, at least as used traditionally, is when water was sprayed onto a hillside, washing it all downslope and through sluice boxes.

Suction dredging is co ducted instream, where the material on the bottom is sucked up into a sluice box type of contraption.

Don't know of any hydraulicking anymore, the Federal Courts shut it down in CA in the 1880s, i believe, due to primarily agricultural damage. The state, oddly enough, was unwilling to regulate it so the Feds (over)stepped in.

Suction dredging is being hotly contested in at least WA, OR, and CA.

My brother occasionally does some small suction dredging down around Jacksonville, Ore and said the fish line up below the outlet to the sluice and pick off the goodies washed out.

I've heard stories like that too. Also, the suction dredgers remove significant amounts of mercury left over from the gold rushes. They're not all evil.

Strangely enough, Oregon, California, and Idaho have more restrictive rules on suction-dredge mining to protect fish than Washington does, and WDFW has virtually no ability to enforce the minimal regulations that exist in Washington right now. Given the critical state of many wild runs of salmon and steelhead in Washington, Representative Tarleton is trying to introduce some real oversight of suction-dredge mining here. In my view, what she's trying to do is a very good idea, but she knows her proposal faces stiff opposition in the legislature. That's why your comments on the proposed new law are important.

Good points. Representative Tarleton's proposed law is intended specifically to regulate suction-dredge mining in Washington in a meaningful way. That isn't being done right now.

So enlighten us as to why suction dredging needs to be more restricted. I would like a local gold dredger to speak also.....

Thanks

The gold guys are unhappy about it , if you read the law it basically outlaws suction dredging in waters where any ESA listed stocks live , which is most of our rivers and streams if I am thinking correctly, also they will have to buy a permit now for any activity inside the ordinary high water mark. And let " someone" know when and where they will be working/prospecting. If I got that wrong please correct me but that's what I read

There used to be a suction dredge at the mouth of the Sultan every year when the water levels dropped down so he could work the mouth. Not sure what he got out of there but he came back every summer for quite a few years.

The WDFW's rules on mining streams are HIGHLY permissive (for example, the "Fish and Gold" rulebook of April 2009 itself constitutes a miner's permit; see http://wdfw.wa.gov/publications/00290/wdfw00290.pdf), and there is virtually no enforcement (possibly no enforcement at all). It is a fact that suction-dredge mining has the potential to damage streams in which endangered runs of salmon and steelhead live. Furthermore, many hundreds of permits (so-called Hydraulic Project Approvals or HPAs) that represent exceptions to the mining windows specified in the "Fish and Gold" rulebook have been issued by the WDFW. The WDFW has very little if any idea of what those projects that it routinely rubber-stamps with stream-specific HPAs actually do (or have done) to the streams in question. By comparison with Oregon, California, Idaho, and British Columbia, Washington's regulation of suction-dredge mining is lax yet we have plenty of endangered runs of salmon and steelhead. My own view is that the streams with endangered species are public resources and the use of dredges to exploit them for private profit should not be allowed at all (hobby panning for gold is different). Representative Tarleton's bill is a commonsense, overdue move to bring some meaningful oversight to an activity that can further damage our already degraded streams.

You say WA is lax in its rules and has no enforcement. How would this change the enforcement? The recreational mining rules have been in the legislature since sometime in the 90s. That would be a decade or more in which to collect information on the what, where, good, bad.

This is one of a whole lot of activities that need an honest look at the impacts to fish.

A question that has been asked by miners "why should I be restricted from killing or injuring fish because of my recreational choice while you (F&G agencies) license people to kill those same fish commercially and recreationally." The fish is just as dead.

1. The money collected from issuing mining permits/licenses would go to enforcement, at least in part. That isn't happening now.

2. WDFW simply has not collected data on the effects of suction-dredge mining: it just has not been a priority. I suspect that's due to lack of funding. Money from the permitting/licensing of stream mining could support a genuine data-collection effort.

3. On the Olympic Peninsula, where I fish, one wild winter steelhead can be kept during the season. (Some people don't keep any natives on the OP.) And fishing for winter steelhead on the Puget Sound rivers has often just been shut down completely in recent years. The concern with laxly regulated suction-dredge mining in Washington is with stream-spawned wild salmon and steelhead, for which catch limits have been more and more restrictive. So why should miners get what amounts to a free pass to do whatever they like to streambeds used for spawning by wild fish? It defies common sense when many stocks of salmon and steelhead in this state are endangered.

So we have ESA listed fish in most of the streams, the rules have been in effect since the 90's, do you really believe that WDFG folks have not got the knowledge to make corrections to the laws after this amount of time. River hydraulics are not new to them. I will leave it at that.

Yes, I really do believe that stream-by-stream assessments of the effects of suction-dredge mining in Washington have not been done -- because they haven't. The WDFW's rules (more like guidelines) are highly permissive to begin with, and they aren't being enforced here. Why have other western states felt compelled to put tight regulations on stream mining in place? Are you suggesting that miners in Washington should continue to get special regulatory treatment to do pretty much as they please with streambeds when fishermen have to comply with more and more restrictive regulations? How does that make sense?

I would venture that the number of sleds on the skykomish with jets probably do as much to the gravel as a small dredge working, and what about boats dragging anchor to slow the drift. Can't say that I have seen much of an issue by small scale dredgers as of yet.

The other states, at least CA, have been compelled to act by lawsuit.

One question that needs asking is specifically where does the dredging occur? There is very little evidence that I can find to even support serching for gold in a lot of rivers in WA. Most of the mining (successful) was in the Cascades and east as I recall.

If WDFW were to start with "where is the gold to found" and concentrate there with SD regulations I would be more supportive. It would mean, too, that areas without historically recovered gold should simply be closed to SD until such time as other methods (panning??) show that it might work there.

The truth of it is that most of those places that suction dredges are working are spots that have already been mined in the past , also miners already have rules to follow and are already restricted by the time of year open to dredging . Also what these guys are doing is not in spawning areas , they are targeting bedrock and deep pools where gold has fallen out of the water column during a storm , so the rocks and gold and small pieces of quartz are in the cracks of the bedrock and they basically suck them out of the crack. Run the product through the sluice and leave clean gravel and stones up on the shore after its been run , there is not much silt because of where they are running and the hydrology of the river , small fish will be attracted to the flow coming off the sluice and will pick off biologicals that result from cleaning the paydirt.

Some day we will all be regulated right off all the rivers, all of us. I am all for regs that are needed but will resist new ones till its proved necessary.

[quote=N W Panhandler]So enlighten us as to why suction dredging needs to be more restricted. I would like a local gold dredger to speak also.....

You gotta be kidding me....
I don't care if it's stream mining or in the salt. It is nothing more than rototilling the bottom. Look at Agate Pass. For hundreds of years, there were tens of thousands of cod spawning there. In the early 80's, the geoduck harvesters used hydrolics (fire hoses) to "mine" the clams. The habitat was scrubbed. By 1989, no more cod. You can't even catch one there if you tried.

Jet sleds are the same as suction harvest? I'd agree sleds can't be good, but I'd liken surface-based jet thrust more to flood-stage flows, than I would to suction harvest of a streambed. (No I don't have a sled). Most jet thrust doesn't dig 18" deep or cover solid areas of the stream.

Mining=rototilling. What good can come of it, except to those FEW that get the cash?

Short term fish do feed off the tailings coming out of the sluice box, long term you just made a waste land of the river bottom. People really need too look at the effects of in river suction dredging. Hi banking is another term for hydraulic mining. The Chetco river had a person from WA put claims on 24 MILES of the wild and scenic section of the Chetco .IT'S in the courts now ,some of the locations were in State Parks. I'm not a tree hugger just an old fisherman that's seen the mining effect on the Trinity River, American, Klamath ,Scott ,Rogue and more. Why is the Pebble mine bad and it's OK to mine WA,OR and CA river's?