A History of Mining: Is the Yuba Watershed still Plagued with Mercury?

Share with Your People
Historic photograph of hydraulic mining operations

The California Gold Rush brought dramatic changes to the landscape of the Yuba River watershed. Miners and settlers displaced native people, denigrating their communities and practices, and left the landscape covered in evidence of hydraulic mining. They cleared hillsides of trees and vegetation and scoured them clean of gravel and soil. We can see evidence of this damage throughout the watershed.

In 2014, SYRCL set out to understand the impact of abandoned mines on water quality and the local community. We conducted outreach with landowners and stakeholders, partnered with The Sierra Fund and The San Juan Ridge Taxpayers Association. We identified three watersheds that potentially contained high levels of mercury and sediment loss and have spent the last several years (between 2014 and 2017) collecting data to better understand how much mercury and sediment were still moving out of these hydraulic mine sites and into the Yuba River watershed.

Scotchman Falls during a storm event

SYRCL recently completed two reports; Spring and Shady Creeks: Mercury and Suspended Sediment and Scotchman Creek Watershed Assessment, as part of work that was funded by the Cosumnes American Bear Yuba (CABY) Integrated Regional Water Management Group in partnership with The Sierra Fund and funded by California Department of Water Resources and The Rose Foundation for Communities and the Environment.

What is Hydraulic Mining? Why are we worried about Mercury? What is SYRCL doing about this?

Discover more about mining in the Yuba River Watershed:

SYRCL recently completed two reports; Spring and Shady Creeks: Mercury and Suspended Sediment and Scotchman Creek Watershed Assessment. Read the full reports below:

Share with Your People

Did you enjoy this post?

Get new SYRCL articles delivered to your inbox by subscribing to our ENews.

One Comment

  1. Although it was well written and no doubt successful in its purpose of gaining support from the uneducated , I did not enjoy the article for that same reason. We all want to protect the environment, have pristine drinking water, healthy fish, beautiful landscapes, etc. We all know that hydraulic mining was a bad idea that never should have happened. Apparently we don’t all know that mercury is a natural occurring element, mercury was not used in hydraulic mining or any other mining for that matter, mercury was used in the process of getting the gold out of the concentrates which unfortunately was often done near the rivers back in the day especially in smaller operations. The most unfortunate thing is the fact that modern recreational mining equipment and techniques are the most efficient and effective way to capture and remove mercury and other heavy metals from our rivers and streams and organizations like the Sierra Fund and others have done everything in their power to kill recreational mining and dredging therefore actually doing more harm to the environment than your readers will ever know, hurting the livelihood of thousands of individuals and businesses that rely on recreational gold mining for survival really, not just enjoyment or quality of life. And the fact that those individuals and business owners actually care more for the environment in which they you are referring to , with no hidden motives or agendas unlike many of these organizations mentioned here who are on some kind of money hungry power trip and care more about control than they do the environment.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *