Check it out! Someone finally got permission to build atop the gold trailings. After decades of hauling dirt from the gold mines in the mountains, Colorado City wound up with an enormous mound of extraction mining offal. For years an Australian conglomerate was negotiating to remove the last bits of gold through cyanide leeching.

Anyway you couldn’t build on a pile of dirt, especially a pile of dirt still saturated with so many mining poisons.

But somehow developers have been given the go ahead. As long as they add topsoil. As long as prospecive inhabitants are warned not to keep gardens, or dig, or drink from the sprinklers, or spend too much time in their basements. Because of the Radon.

They want to call it Gold Hill Mesa. But a man-made hill is called a mound. And it’s not gold, it’s a pile of cast-off trailings left by the mill. It would do better to be called the Love-of-Gold Mound, or Love Canal for short, because there is a precedent. And we can have Al Gore come condemn it now.