Bill Simon, 1944-2025
Plus: Thoughts on L.A. fires and Mining Monitor
The San Juan Mountains lost a powerful advocate and influential character on Jan. 5 with the passing of William “Bill” Simon of Durango and Silverton, Colorado.
I first met Simon in 1996, shortly after I moved to Silverton to work for the Silverton Standard & the Miner newspaper. I don’t remember the exact circumstances, but I imagine I had sought him out since, to the dismay of my bosses, I was interested in writing about mining-related pollution in the watershed, and was told Simon was the go-to guy on the issue.
I probably expected to find some sort of nonprofit-style bureaucrat sitting in an office somewhere, working up lawsuits against mining corporations. But no. Simon was at his old welding shop, a lanky guy with longish, unkempt hair, a Fu Manchu mustache, and dressed in grungy jeans and a long-sleeved denim shirt. He struck me as a bit of a hippy, albeit one who could wield a welding torch and pilot a backhoe.
He spoke slowly and thoughtfully in a gravelly voice, and it soon became clear that while he may have been an environmentalist — he was among the founders of Earth Day during his grad school days in Berkeley — he was first and foremost a scientist and intellectual who embraced the complexity of the hydrologic situation in the San Juans. He had no agenda or axe to grind, just a keen desire to understand the issues and to improve water quality to whatever degree was possible, and to work with whomever he could to accomplish that.
Simon was not only an invaluable source for me as I reported on these issues, first for the Standard and then for the San Juan Mountain Journal, but he also was a role model, who inspired me to seek out complexity, nuance, and gray areas — especially when it comes to environmental issues. Simon will be greatly missed. The following is his obituary:
William “Bill” Simon of Durango and Silverton, Colorado, passed away peacefully on Jan. 5, 2025 under the care of the doctors and nurses of of the Mercy Hospice House. He will be remembered for his selfless dedication to understanding the water quality issues of the upper Animas River watershed, and his uncanny ability to bring disparate groups together to cooperatively tackle the problems.
Simon was born on Nov. 27, 1944 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Jim and Jane Simon. When Bill was three years old, the family moved to Loveland, Colorado, and started a farm. At a young age, Bill and his brother largely took over the farm and raised sheep, learned animal husbandry, gardened, and ran a trapline. Bill grew up hunting, fishing, skiing, and jeeping all over the region and worked for a summer on a Wyoming ranch with his good friend John Siedel.
Simon attended Western Colorado University in Gunnison, where he raced on the alpine ski team, before transferring to the University of Colorado, Boulder. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in botany, he went to Berkeley on a NASA fellowship to pursue a doctorate in evolutionary ecology. He helped start the Environmental Studies College there, and was on the founding board of Earth Day.
But when the military started taking an interest in Simon and the work he was doing, the young scientist, who had also been active in the anti-Vietnam War effort, decided it was time to go. He took a “permanent leave of absence” from Berkeley, met his wife Arlene, and the two of them landed in the bustling mining town of Silverton, where they opened a candle-making, leather-working, and crafts business.
Simon also worked underground at the Sunnyside Gold Mine before breaking out on his own as Alpine Mine Construction. He did large-scale welding, operated heavy equipment, and did reclamation work for various mines. Oftentimes, after completing whatever work he was hired to do, Simon would clean up some of the junk from the old mines, and even plant a few trees. He also began to wonder whether the streams, which the state had declared “dead” due to mining pollution, could actually support fish.
In 1984 Simon was elected to the San Juan County Board of County Commissioners. It provided him an opportunity to test his fish question. With a group of miners, who were also anglers, he hiked into the backcountry carrying packs that held thousands of tiny brook and cutthroat trout, donated by the state Division of Wildlife, and poured them into the healthiest-looking streams and lakes. To nearly everyone’s surprise, many of them survived, proving that, with adequate cleanup, some segments of stream could support a fish population.
In 1994, Simon and and other volunteers worked with the state to create the Animas River Stakeholders Group to address water quality issues with a community-based, collaborative approach. Simon was chosen to be the coordinator. “We figured we could empower the people in the community to do the job without top-down management,” Simon said. “Giving the power to the people develops stewardship for the resource, and that’s particularly useful in this day and age.”
For the next two decades, the ARSG thoroughly researched the Animas River watershed, educated the public, and, with the cooperation of industry and regulators, worked on dozens of projects aimed at improving water quality. Within ten years of ARSG’s founding, the Animas River grew cleaner, and trout populations and diversity increased. Simon and his ARSG colleagues also pushed Congress to pass “good samaritan” legislation that would allow volunteers to clean up draining mine adits without incurring liability. President Biden finally signed the bill into law in December.
Simon featured prominently in numerous stories about the ARSG and mining-related pollution, including the nonfiction book River of Lost Souls, by Jonathan Thompson. And the sixth episode of Acid Mine Nation, a series of documentaries by filmmaker Tom Schillaci about the Upper Animas watershed and the ARSG, is dedicated to Simon.
Simon and the ARSG under his leadership were awarded many honors, including the U.S. Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Regional 2007 Partnership of the Year Award, and the U.S. Interior Department’s Cooperative Conservation Award. The Mountain Studies Institute honored Simon and his ARSG co-founders, Peter Butler and Steve Fearn, with a sculpture and plaque along the Animas River for their dedication to improving water quality. Simon also received a Lifetime Achievement Award at a Sustaining Colorado Watersheds Conference.
Somehow Simon found the time for his many hobbies, including skiing (he and his friends pioneered many San Juan backcountry routes in the 1970s), gelande ski jumping, ice skating, gardening, drumming, traveling, and making jewelry. He was also a member of the Durango Gem and Mineral Club. Simon spent the last years of his life enjoying the farm in Hermosa, the fruits of a 50-year dream that he and Arlene worked for, tirelessly, where they gardened, raised sheep, and maintained an orchard.
Bill is survived by brothers Bobby and Don; his wife of 52 years, Arlene; daughters Heidi (Matt, Lindsey and Paige Rettmer) and Brook; and granddaughter Whitney. Those who wish to do so can make a donation in Simon’s memory to the Davis Phinney Foundation for Parkinson’s Disease. A Celebration of Life will take place in the spring.
🔥 Never-ending Fire Season Beat 🚒
Hellish, apocalyptic, tragic: all appropriate adjectives for the images of the Los Angeles fires that have saturated social and news media over the past several days. Fifty-foot high columns of flame, driven by furious Santa Ana winds, razed entire neighborhoods, a synagogue, an art museum, and forced residents to leave everything behind and flee for their lives. Some abandoned their cars and set out on foot after traffic jammed up on windy L.A. roads.
As of Thursday night, the blazes had taken at least ten lives, destroyed more than 9,000 homes and structures, forced the evacuation of about 130,000 people, and left tens of thousands of households and businesses without power, according to the Los Angeles Times. The toll likely will continue to climb in the coming days, making this one of the nation’s most costliest natural disasters ever.
Almost exactly two years ago, the Marshall Fire raced through the grass into the suburban sprawl of Superior and Louisville, jumping parking lots and strip malls, filling the air with smoke, and burning through nearly 1,000 homes. At the time I wrote that it redefined the collective notion of the urban-wildfire interface and any concept of a fire season that has an end and beginning.
The L.A. fires, taking place right in the middle of what is supposed to be southern California’s calm, rainy season, continue to obliterate the idea that there is such a thing as a fire season. The fire gods apparently don’t take vacations in the global heating era, and 2024 was the earth’s hottest year on record.
The wildland-urban interface (WUI) is the transition zone between human-occupied and unoccupied lands that are typically on the outskirts of suburban or exurban areas. Sometimes entire communities sprawl through the WUI. It’s typically the most hazardous place to have a house, forest-fire-wise, since there’s no buffer zones or fire lines between the forest and the structures. But the Eaton Fire, the blaze that devoured much of Altadena and parts of Pasadena, quickly blasted through the WUI and into the urban grid, where houses burned like trees in a thick forest.
Even as new fires were being sparked by wind-carried embers, the usual suspects started playing the blame game. Some liberals accused mansion-dwelling billionaires of draining fire hydrants to fill their swimming pools, pointed to oil companies for their contribution to global warming (which reputedly caused the fires), or said the L.A. fire department wasn’t adequately equipped because their funding had been diverted to the police.
Those on the right, meanwhile, predictably and bigotedly blamed DEI, wokeness, Biden, and California Gov. Gavin Newsom. President-elect Trump had the gall to suggest that proposed water projects draining the Sacramento River Delta would have somehow prevented or enabled firefighters to stop the fires. Of course, this is the same guy that said there is a giant faucet in Canada that could simply be turned on to supply the West’s water needs, or that raking the forest would stop wildfires. Once again, he’s way off, blatantly displaying his ignorance to the world (as for the DEI/wokeness BS? It’s just tired old racist BS with no basis in reality).
Some hydrants did, in fact, run dry or lose pressure. But that’s not due to billionaires or a water shortage. It’s because the infrastructure was not designed to fight multiple urban wildfires at once. The L.A. Times’ Ian James, Matt Hamilton, and Ruben Vives explain it here. As for the budget cuts? It’s complicated (there was a cut, then there wasn’t, but fire officials still worried that limited funds would hamper preparedness), but more money wouldn’t have done much to combat hurricane-force winds that grounded firefighting aircraft.
And how about that climate change thing? As always, it’s not clear cut, but it certainly appears as if global warming and the resulting “weather whiplash” contributed to the fires’ severity.
Last winter brought huge rains to southern California: In February, Los Angeles received over 12 inches of precipitation, or three times the 1991-2020 normal for the month, much if it coming in just one storm. As temperatures rise, the atmosphere can hold more moisture, resulting in heavier rainfall. March was also unusually wet, and April was about average. It was enough to erase any lingering signs of drought in the region.
All of that water nourished the vegetation — i.e. fuel — in the foothills around the city. But L.A. received zero measurable precipitation and above average temperatures from June through October, drying out the abundant fuel, bringing back drought conditions, and setting the stage for disaster when the Santa Ana winds arrived in the fall. Normally the autumn fire and Santa Ana season is squelched by a moist December; this year December was utterly dry for L.A. and abnormally warm.
And then the Santa Ana winds returned with a vengeance, driven by a storm moving down from Canada into the Rockies and Great Basin. All that was needed was a spark — a tossed cigarette, a BBQ charcoal caught in the breeze, a live utility line blowing against a tree — to unleash a hellish and unstoppable inferno.
⛏️ Mining Monitor ⛏️
Grants Energy is looking to extract uranium on private land near Grants, New Mexico, an area that was ravaged by Cold War-era uranium mining. Grants Energy plans to use the in-situ recovery method, which doesn’t require any actual mining. Instead, boreholes are drilled into the underground uranium deposit, a chemical solution is pumped into the deposit, dissolving the uranium ore, and the resulting solution is then pumped back to the surface. Grants intends to use horizontal wells of the kind currently in vogue among oil and gas drillers. The uranium is then extracted from the solution. The surface impacts are far less than with conventional mining. However, as is the case with oil and gas drilling, leaky well-casings and so forth could lead to groundwater contamination.
Anson Resources, the same company that is working on lithium extraction projects near Green River and Dead Horse State Park in Utah, says it has received all of the necessary federal and state permits to begin uranium exploration drilling on its Yellow Cat claims north of Arches National Park. Drilling isn’t mining, of course, but it’s one step in that direction and has impacts of its own.
Back in November, as I was driving from Bloomfield to Aztec, New Mexico, I was shocked to see what looked like a massive construction project between Hwy. 550 and the gargantuan natural gas processing plant that threatens to gobble up a tiny catholic cemetery. Turns out an Arkansas firm is looking to build a hydraulic fracturing-sand mining and processing facility there, according to a report in the Tri-City Record. Some local residents are, naturally, concerned. Not only will the operation have direct impacts on nearby residents (noise, dust, and so forth), but it will also mean a lot of truck traffic to haul the sand out into the oil and gas fields. It also must mean that drilling activity in the San Juan Basin is expected to tick up again. Oh boy …
❄️ Snow Studies 🌨️
Last week the Land Desk reported on the somewhat meagre, and quite fragile, avalanche-prone snowpack. Since then there have been two more avalanche-related fatalities in the U.S., with one of them occurring on Red Mountain #3 south of Ouray. It was one of several slides reported in the area following recent snows. The Colorado Avalanche Information Center listed some of the incidents in a Jan. 8 Facebook post:
And, finally, it’s the Land Desk’s fourth birthday! Yeehaw! I started this newsletter on Jan. 10, 2021, not really knowing what to expect. Since then I’ve posted more than 200 dispatches and somehow have managed to attract over 4,000 subscribers (paid and unpaid, combined). I am brimming with gratitude to all of you readers, especially the paid subscribers, and most especially Founding/Sustaining Members. I have no intention of slowing down, damnit! And the next few years promise to be, well, interesting in the spaces and beats we cover. So keep tuning in and hang on for year 5 of the Land Desk.
Oh, I treasure the times I walked through tailings piles with Bill Simon. He was so patient for decades answering my questions. How many of us owe what we have learned of the intricacies of the rock and water under that giant caldera to Bill’s crusade against the machine? This is how things work, he told the bureaucrats, the mega corporations, the media, the citizens over and over. A catalyst of understated determined power. A treasure of the San Juans. A crusty, regular guy enduring incredible delays and deceit over decades who nudged the trembling needle of truth a bit closer to reality and action.
Bill Simon sounds like quite a guy and what a life! We certainly could use many more like him.
It sounds like he attempted to raise awareness and educate about climate change and the damage we all do to our planet.