Many of the old mines have never been cleaned up and the discarded metals and acids are leaking into Utah's mountain streams and watersheds. That could stop, though, if a partnership between government agencies, environmental groups and private landowners announced Wednesday works as intended.

Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth, Snowbird owner Richard D. Bass and representatives of Trout Unlimited - a national conservation group focused on protecting trout and salmon habitat - joined forces to bring attention to the problem of abandoned mines throughout the West. The partnership also praises the work being done to restore the American Fork watershed in the Uinta National Forest, a project they hope will act as a "positive model of restoration" for other areas dealing with similar issues.

"There's literally thousands of abandoned mines in the West," Bosworth said. "There's 38,000 on Forest Service lands alone."

And those 38,000 abandoned mines are just a fraction of the problem. Although exact numbers are hard to come by, a new Trout Unlimited report on abandoned mines in the West, Settled, Mined & Left Behind, puts the total number at more than 500,000 when mines on privately owned land are added to the equation.

The abandoned mines can lead to contamination of streams as excavated rock is exposed to air and water, leading to metals such as zinc or lead flowing into streams, or leading to chemical reactions that can create sulfuric acid, which also seeps into waterways. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 40 percent of mountain streams and rivers in the West have been polluted by hard-rock mining in some fashion, totaling more than 16,000 river miles.

Chris Wood, vice president for conservation for Trout Unlimited, calls the abandoned hard-rock mines the "environmental equivalent of a crazy aunt in the attic, a problem no one wants to talk about," and said their cleanup is "perhaps the most significant and least addressed" environmental problem in the West.

The barriers to cleaning up abandoned mines come in more forms than just the remoteness of the areas where most are located, or the fact that thousands of the mines have no one legally responsible for their reclamation. For one, private landowners who bought affected land long after mining was done can be held legally responsible if they try to clean up the sites themselves, under the country's Superfund law. And the U.S. Forest Service can only reclaim mining sites on Forest Service land, even if adjoining private land remains contaminated.

"If we can't pull private landowners in, in some cases you're wasting money cleaning up national forests," Bosworth said.

Still, the various officials on hand Wednesday are hopeful the partnership that has helped make considerable progress cleaning up mine contamination in the American Fork watershed can work in other places. The Pacific Mill mine site was identified by the Forest Service as the worst contaminator within the watershed, with high concentrations of lead, arsenic, zinc, iron, copper and cadmium washing from a tailings pile into the North Fork American Fork Creek.

The polluted areas include both Forest Service land and private land owned by Snowbird, and the joint efforts of those two entities, along with Trout Unlimited, have taken care of about 75 percent of the problem at Pacific Mill, according to Ted Fitzgerald, a former Forest Service employee who is now working for Trout Unlimited. There are still private landowners who need to be recruited to the effort, Fitzgerald added, but if they are, and funding comes through, the Pacific Mill site will have been cleaned up for $2 million.

"That will take care of most of the water quality issues in American Fork Canyon, if we can get Pacific Mill done," he said.

Snowbird sees the chance to partner with the Forest Service and Trout Unlimited as both a good deed and good business, according to the resort's general manager Bob Bonar.

"The number-one product of Snowbird, and I think most ski resorts and mountain resorts, is the environment," Bonar said, noting that most of the buildings at Snowbird, and 30 percent of the ski runs, are built on old mining claims. "It's the most important thing that we have.

The partnership is an opportunity to do the right thing and move forward and get things done," he said.

nailen@sltrib.com