Click the link to read the article on The Durango Telegraph website (Jonathan Romeo). Here’s an excerpt:
In 2016, Gretchen Fitzgerald, a forester then with the San Juan National Forest, had a rather unconventional idea: What if we planted trees in a pile of mine waste? As the restoration forester for the district, Fitzgerald identified one of the many areas around Silverton impacted by legacy mining in the San Juan Mountains, a site known as the Brooklyn Mine, just northwest of town.
“Looking around that site, I saw some seedlings naturally creeping around from the side,” Fitzgerald said in an interview with The Durango Telegraph this week. “So I said, ‘Let’s try it.’”
[…]
Now, five years later, Fitzgerald has since moved onto the Sequoia National Park in California. Her trees, however, are doing remarkably well. This summer, in the first monitoring of the site since 2019, it was confirmed that nearly 100% of the trees survived and are thriving.
“It’s exciting,” Fitzgerald said. “There’s a lot of mines around there. We could expand this and do more work.”
