"YELLOW PINE, Idaho — Twenty-five miles out, the road turns to gravel and follows a creek to the closest thing to a speck of a town in what might be the most remote place in the Lower 48.
Turning right at the Corner, which offers the last hot meal until Montana, 100 miles of wilderness away, the road reaches the Salmon River and then hugs the edge of the canyon for a heart-pounding 14 miles until it arrives at the Stibnite Mining District.
Stibnite, a mining hotbed since 1899, is where a Canadian company envisions a different future for mining and where environmentalists see the same old calamity.
Midas Gold Corp. plans to build one of the country's biggest open-pit mines on 2,000 acres near the source of the Salmon, known as the "River of No Return" and famed for its fishing, whitewater and solitude, in a region already scarred by decades of mining."
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