How to join

Blue Flax Friends is open to any resident or visitor to Colorado and other Rocky Mountain states who commits to protecting native wildflowers such as blue flax and paintbrush and to removing dandelions, thistle, and other invasive species that threaten the habitats of native flowers.

To join, just add a comment to a post on this blog, stating your intent to protect and remove. You can also like Blue Flax Friends on Facebook.

Monday, August 10, 2015

Blue flax plants aren't the only wild life that need friends.

The August 5 waste spill from the Gold King Mine east of Silverton shows the dangers to plant, animal, and human life hidden in these beautiful mountains.

Thank you to the Los Angeles Times for this page-one summary five days later.

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-river-mine-spill-20150810-story.html#page=1

"The danger posed by mines was laid out in a 1993 report from the Mineral Policy Center, a Washington think tank dedicated to identifying threats to natural resources. The study said there were about 557,650 of these sites in 32 states and 50 billion tons of untreated waste covering public and private land. The waste included arsenic, asbestos, cadmium, cyanide and mercury," reports David Kelly.

The gold rush thinking was "Get the gold now, worry about waste later."

Now it's 150 years later, and we are encountering the poisons turned loose in 1880 and later.

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