Across great expanses of the region, the soils exhibit strange imbalances in their mineral composition.  These imbalances repress normal plant growth, allowing the evolution of a community of botanical eccentrics:  odd and often highly localized plant species that are beautifully adapted to their challenging circumstances.  Other geological residues exhibit an equally powerful ability to unbalance the human psyche.  The Klamath-Siskiyou is rich in metals:  copper, nickel, chromium, and, most heady of all, gold.  Beginning in 1850, the mania of miners expressed itself in a paroxysm of digging, dredging, sluicing, and burning that led the native peoples to conclude that the strangers pouring into their region were simply insane.  Today, the metallic and the botanic legacies of the ancient past are in collision at a place called Rough and Ready Creek.

Rough and Ready Creek is a small stream that winds through a pristine, pine-clad canyon in the South Kalmiopsis Roadless Area and enters the Illinois River not far south of Cave Junction.  The watershed’s serpentine soils are high in magnesium and low in calcium, the reverse of the usual concentrations of these elements.  This thwarts the development of a conventional plant community, and produces a landscape of stark and rocky beauty.  Such is the unstoppable vitality of life, however, that Rough and Ready Creek is a world-renowned treasure-trove of  the unique plant species that depend on this particular kind of adversity.

The soils of Rough and Ready Creek also harbor treasure of quite another sort: high concentrations of nickel and iron.  A mining plan has been filed on over 4000 acres of public land in the watershed.  The NICORE proposal would construct a nickel-laterite mine and smelter on this land, and to build roads that would cross through the creek sixteen times - would destroy forever the wilderness qualities and botanical riches of Rough and Ready Creek.  Citing the provisions of the 1872 Mining Law,  NICORE is demanding that the Forest Service turn over ownership of this land for as little as $2.50 an acre.   Local environmentalists are fighting to protect the creek and its plants, a battle that challenges the archaic basis of government mining policy:  a 125-year old law that reflects the economics and priorities of a long-vanished frontier society.