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?”