[esbranson]

> contaminated drinking water, poor air quality, acid rain that ruins your cars paint, noise and light pollution etc, etc,

Ah yes, who can forget everyone's experience at the Denver, Colorado zoo, a 10 minute drive (or 30-40 minute bike ride) from a massive oil refinery operating since the 1930s. Same with the Rocky Mountains, totally polluted and gross by the likes of factories like Coors. Definitely stay away from those places. Sundance Film Festival in Boulder, CO? With so many factories up there and everywhere around, what's going to get them first, Colorado's water, air, or rain?

[bediger4000]

Look up on the hillsides as you drive west on I70. See those yellowish piles of rock? Mine tailings leaching arsenic and all kinds of bad stuff. Take a tour of the Argo mill in Idaho Springs. They'll let you look at the rainbow colored water running out of that old mine. Rockies aren't totally polluted but it's not rosy either.

[esbranson]

Pity the kids getting jobs in the ol' Argo Mill. Exactly what the article and OP are lamenting: trillions of dollars of investment in 1800s-era mining for gold, that rare earth metal vital to national security. No sane person would ever want to live in the Rockies.

[bediger4000]

That's something of a modern viewpoint. If you hike in the Rockies, you'll find that a lot of the bronze survey markers on top of mountains are stamped "Bureau of Reclamation". Mountainous regions weren't valued except for extractive purposes until recently. Why do you think Long's Peak and the Mummy Range were available to be converted to Rocky Mountain National Park in 1915?