In part two of this series, we learn why a tribal commission isn’t happy with British Columbia’s mining regulations. And why the mine’s owner said they are proud of how they’re running the mine. Part one has more detail of the report.

Red Chris Mine sits 25 miles from Alaska’s border in the Stikine River Watershed. It has operated for a decade, but its ownership changed two years ago. Before the new company, Newmont, bought the mine, conservation scientists conducted research over a seven year span. Newmont has made some environmental adjustments since they acquired the mine in 2023. But they are also hoping to expand the copper and gold mine, which is already bigger than Wrangell Island. That’s even after an environmental report was published last month. It shows heavy metals have leached into a transboundary Alaska and British Columbia watershed. Communities downstream of the Stikine River are concerned about this, including Wrangell’s tribal government, the Wrangell Cooperative Association.

“It’s very difficult when you have colonial constructs imposed on you,” WCA Tribal Administrator Esther Aaltséen Reese said. She’s the president of Southeast Indigenous Transboundary Commission, which represents 15 tribal groups in Alaska and Canada. “We view the border as a colonial construct.”

She said downstream tribes are the ones that will get the ill effects of mining and they should have a say in how safe the mines upriver are. 

A report last month by SkeenaWild Conservation Trust researched the mine’s impacts over the first seven years of operation. It said that numerous contaminants from the mine, mainly selenium and copper, are elevated in the surrounding creeks and lakes. These levels are high enough to impact aquatic life, according to the report. Reese said she’s worried about the Stikine River salmon that so many rely on. 

“Any kind of failure would just have a huge risk to downstream human populations – us here in Wrangell,” she said. “This is a very critical issue.”

Reese said they have requested to meet with Canada’s Tahltan Central Government since the mine is in their territory and they co-manage it with Newmont. KSTK reached out to the Tahltan Central Government and hasn’t received a response.

Researcher hopes the report will act as a model for similar mining projects in B.C.

Adrienne Berchtold is the primary author of the environmental report. She’s an ecologist and mining impacts researcher with SkeenaWild Conservation Trust. 

She said her team made the report as a model for other similar proposed mining projects in British Columbia. Currently, there are eight active copper mines operating in the province.

The report states that the leaching contaminants have affected rainbow trout in the mine’s surrounding lakes, which are part of the Stikine River Watershed. Berchtold hopes the findings will encourage B.C. to improve policies and regulations.

“Our concern is that the provincial government has not required mine owners to address that and to really look into what impact those trends might be having on fish in the receiving lakes,” she said.

Newmont spokesperson Kievan Hirji said since they acquired the mine in 2023, the company has established a relationship with the Tahltan First Nation, co-managing the mine under an Impact Benefit Agreement. 

“We’re very proud to be going through that process,” he said. “[We] have been working very, very closely with the Tahltan Nation since acquiring Red Chris in 2023 to build a really positive and strong relationship that’s really predicated on that consent as well as transparency and trust and a shared vision for the future.”

According to Hirji, about 15 percent of Newmont workers are members of the Tahltan Nation.

“We also pay royalty payments to the Tahltan Nation,” he said. “That mine is reaching its end of life within the next couple of years, and if that economic success is going to continue, the mine requires an extension to the life of mine.”

That extension, he said, would be an underground mine, or block cave mine. It would sit within the footprint of the existing open pit mine and is expected to last 13 years. 

“We will leave it to the province of British Columbia to continue with that engagement.”

First, Hirji said, British Columbia and the Tahltan Nation must assess Newmont’s proposal. The tribal consortium testified this spring against the project. 

As for the tailings dams, which hold the mine’s waste, there have been links drawn between the Mount Polley dam and Red Chris’s. Mount Polley’s tailings dam broke in 2014, contaminating nearby waterways. But Hirji said Red Chris’s is constructed differently, even if some of the materials are the same. 

“We’ve looked very carefully at the structural integrity of the dam at the Red Chris Mine with Tahltan Central Government, and there is no concern with respect to structural integrity,” he said. “That dam is structurally sound, safe.”

An ongoing concern of downriver tribes is that they haven’t had much say in the mine’s operation. Hirji said that’s not the company’s fault – it’s up to the British Columbia government.

“We will leave it to the province of British Columbia to continue with that engagement,” he said. “We’re really focused on the relationship that we have with Tahltan Nation through the Impact, Benefit and Co-management Agreement, and really building a shared vision with Tahltan Nation.”  

Shawn Larabee is the communications manager of BC’s  Ministry of Mining and Critical Minerals. He said British Columbia takes environmental protections seriously. He wrote in an email that QUOTE “the scope of consultation the Province undertakes with U.S. Tribes may be different from its consultation with First Nations in B.C.” 

Last year’s annual reports of Red Chris Mine are expected to be made available by the B.C. government in the coming weeks.

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This article is part one of a two-part series about the Red Chris Mine and its potential threat to the Stikine River.

The Red Chris Mine is already huge — at 89 square miles, it’s bigger than Wrangell Island. And the mine — which is just 25 miles from the British Columbia border on the Canadian side — could get bigger. British Columbia officials are expediting expansion plans due to the Trump Administration’s recent tariffs. 

But a conservation group is raising alarms that the gold and copper mine is already leaching heavy metals into the Stikine River watershed. In a report released March 17, the SkeenaWild Conservation Trust says the mine is “releasing significantly more contaminated seepage” to the watershed than predicted.

Tribal groups downstream from the mine say the report speaks to their concerns about whether it could harm subsistence resources they rely on.

“We have long had concerns for the Red Chris Mine,” said Jill Weitz, who serves as a government affairs liaison with the Central Council of Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska. “Even before we knew that there was potential seepage coming from their tailing storage facility.”

Contamination found in lakes and creeks

The open pit mine extracts 11 million tons of ore per year. If it’s expanded to include an underground mine, that could increase to 15 million tons per year. Three tailings dams surround the mine to store the rock waste, which will exist in perpetuity.

Adrienne Berchtold, an ecologist who studies mining impacts for SkeenaWild, is the study’s primary author. Her team used data collected by the mine from the first seven years of the Red Chris Mine’s operation, from 2015 to 2022, to analyze environmental impacts from the dam.

Berchtold said they did not find evidence that the mine is contaminating the Stikine River or its two major tributaries, the Iskut and the Klappan. But she said toxins are contaminating lakes and creeks that are closer to the mine. 

Tests at surrounding water bodies found that contaminants have seeped into the groundwater from tailings deposits since the mine began operating. The report also says contaminants have been seeping from the dam’s waste rock storage area since at least 2017.

The report says contamination levels have increased in Ealue and Kluea Lakes as well as Trail and Quarry Creeks, which flow into major tributaries of the Stikine River. Selenium and copper were the main contaminants found in the creeks and lakes, and the report says their levels were high enough to affect aquatic life.

Impacts to fish could affect human health

Berchtold’s team found that the potential impacts to fish in the area could also affect human health.

“There are rainbow trout in the lakes immediately surrounding the mine and people do fish in those lakes,” she said. “They rely on those rainbow trout for sustenance.”

Berchtold said that the area is naturally a highly mineralized environment, and selenium concentrations in fish tissues would already be elevated without the mine there. 

“When you have a situation where those elements are already elevated for natural reasons, that’s even more cause to be even more cautious about how much more of those contaminants you’re putting into the system,” she said.

Berchtold said she doesn’t see risks to the transboundary right now, apart from the rare chance of a catastrophic dam failure. 

“Our shared resources”

Berchtold said SkeenaWild is concerned about the province’s plan to fast-track the mine’s expansion. 

“We’ve seen so much evidence of issues being overlooked,” she said. “I feel that deregulating and kind of pushing through these approvals just risks those types of issues falling by the wayside even more.” 

And while SkeenaWild estimates that the mine will cease ore extraction in 13 years, tribal groups are concerned that it could last much longer.

“That mine is never going to close down,” said Guy Archibald, the Southeast Indigenous Transboundary Commission’s executive director. “It’s just going to keep going, and they’re going to keep asking for more permits and more extensions as long as they can.”

The Red Chris Mine is in the First Nations Tahltan Territory. The Tahltan Central Government has not responded to KSTK’s requests for comment.

But Weitz, of Tlingit and Haida, said she hopes SkeenaWild’s report will help raise awareness of environmental threats posed by Canadian mines in transboundary watersheds. 

“With the relationship between Canada and the United States, we want to ensure that our shared resources are protected,” Weitz said. “This isn’t an ‘us versus them’. This is ‘us and the communities.'”

She said the communities near the Stikine depend on each other, as well as sharing the resources the river offers.

“The majority of these projects in Northwest British Columbia and even Southeast Alaska to date are gold interest,” she said. “What are we willing to risk for the expense of our clean water and our salmon watersheds?”

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At the Red Chris Mine, a dam contains a tailings pond. that collects mine waste. Northwest B.C., 2017. (Courtesy of Garth Lenz)

Financial analysts say a British Columbia mining company is struggling to survive. Imperial Metals owns the Red Chris mine, in the watershed of the Stikine, a river vital to Southeast Alaska fisheries. This is raising concerns for critics of transboundary mining.

Imperial’s stock is on a steady decline. It’s operating with a negative cashflow. And it has 800 million dollars worth of debt coming down the pipe in just over a year.

Imperial Mines did not respond to an interview request, but its financial standing is detailed in recent press releases. These notices say the company is restructuring and has extended the due dates for certain loans.

Jamie Koutsoukis is an analyst at Moody’s Investors Service, which rates companies’ risk of defaulting. She tracks Canadian metal and mining companies. Her firm recently came out with a report and low-rating for Imperial Metals.

She says Imperial’s top investors are not backing out. They will funnel up to $40 million into the company through a rights offering. Still, Koutsoukis doesn’t think that’s a game-changer.

“They would get $40 million, it would give them some room in terms of having cash available to them, but with $800 million due they’ll have to look at alternative financing as well,” Koutsoukis says.

She says operations have been poor at the Red Chris mine because it is extracting lower grade ore and getting less of it than last year. For Mount Polley mine, the forest fires over the summer stifled operations, shutting the mine down for two weeks with a slow recovery.

Imperial Metals also owns the British Columbia Ruddock Creek project, which is undergoing exploration, and Huckleberry Mine where operations are on hold.

Koutsoukis says this financial strain comes despite rising copper prices.

“I think what’s happening with Imperial is really an anomaly,” Koutsoukis says. “This year we’ve seen increased cashflow, increased earnings, just based on the run-up of the copper price.”

The company’s other operating mine, Mount Polly, has become a symbol for mine critics. In 2014, its dam broke, spilling millions of gallons of mine waste rock and sand. The waste, called tailings, poured into nearby lakes and the Cariboo River.

Some environmentalists, fishermen and tribal leaders worry that similar disasters could contaminate the Stikine and other rivers and tributaries in Southeast Alaska.

That includes the Red Chris, a copper/gold mine in northwest British Columbia, which began operations in July of 2015. Its tailings dam is upstream from the watershed of the Stikine River, which empties into the ocean near Wrangell and Petersburg.

Heather Hardcastle is a spokeswoman for Salmon Beyond Borders. The group advocates for clean waters that support sustainable fishing. The group wants to see more transboundary regulation, so that Canadian mines will be held accountable for any damage done to Alaskan waters.  

“Where is the money going to come from to make sure that this mine is first of all operating in a responsible way, which we contend it currently is not, but then also how is it going to be fully reclaimed if this company goes bankrupt,” Hardcastle says.

She wants to see regulation that would keep operators on the hook for pollution from abandoned mines.

“So that companies have to put up a larger enough reclamation bond to cover reclamation in the event of bankruptcy,” Hardcastle says.

She points to British Columbia’s Tulsequah Chief mine, which was abandoned in the 1950s. It continues draining acidic water into the Tulsequah River, which is a tributary of the Taku River, which empties into an ocean near Juneau.

Alaska’s top political leaders agree more accountability in transboundary mining is needed. Alaska’s governor, lieutenant governor and Congressional delegation recently asked our federal government to join the fight.

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