American Fork Canyon is garnering attention as a national model for overcoming the red tape that has so far stymied the cleanup of half a million toxic abandoned mines on private property around the West.

On Tuesday the last measures of contaminated earth were removed from 11 mine sites owned by Snowbird resort along American Fork River in the Mineral Basin area. This marks the end of a three-year private cleanup effort, sponsored by Trout Unlimited, that is the first of its kind in the nation.

"The real test is whether it can be repeated over and over again," said Michael Kowalski, chairman and CEO of Tiffany & Co., the New York City-based jeweler famous for its pricey blue-boxed baubles.

Kowalski and two other Tiffany executives flew to Utah and rode four-wheelers from Tibble Fork to Mineral Basin on Tuesday morning, braving huge mud puddles, choking talcum powder-like dust and a narrow road, which is perched in places along a cliff.

The Tiffany & Co. Foundation has donated $550,000 to help fund the removal of toxins that are contaminating water in American Fork River and two other locations. The work is part of a "Green Gold" campaign, which works to reverse the legacy of century-old mine waste that has poisoned soil and water around the West. Kowalski said there are an estimated 500,000 "orphaned" mines on private property in the West. The tailings of some are leaching poisons including arsenic, zinc and lead into soil and water.

During the next two weeks, the contaminated earth at the last remediation site in American Fork Canyon, called the Pacific Mine site, will be topped with an impervious liner and covered with clean soil that will be seeded with native plants. The toxic tailings will always be in the canyon, but has all been removed to what Ted Fitzgerald, director of the cleanup, called "a high and dry place" that prevents heavy metal from leaching into the river. This "high and dry" alternative is far cheaper than a complete removal of the tailings.

One of the 11 orphaned mines in American Fork Canyon was leeching iron almost 1,000 times the legal drinking water standard into American Fork River. For more than 100 years a constant stream of spring water has flowed through the walls of the mine, picking up enough iron to become an eerie red before flowing out at least two mine entrances, coating rocks and soil with a red skin along its way to the river -- and that was just one example of the toxins hurting fish, plants and wildlife, Fitzgerald said. With Utah County's growing population, the water may also need to be used for drinking water some day, another reason for the cleanup.

Thanks to the removal of the tailings and a series of five settling ponds built by the Forest Service, that water now enters the river with a normal color -- and only rarely registers iron contamination above the federal limit, usually during high spring run-off.

Snowbird resort, which owns the 11 mine sites, did not create the contamination and is not responsible for its cleanup, according to federal law, Fitzgerald said. But the resort is helping to pay for the $1.5 million cleanup anyway, along with donations from Trout Unlimited and Tiffany & Co. -- another reason the American Fork Canyon project is being hailed as a national model for nonprofit, private cleanup. The only taxpayer money involved was a $135,000 grant from the Natural Resources Conservation Service.

The U.S. Forest Service has already cleaned mine tailings sites on public land in the canyon.

Federal law demanded that only a full cleanup be done, making a private effort all but prohibitive. But Trout Unlimited petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency to allow the nonprofit to conduct a partial cleanup, moving the tailings away from the watershed areas in order to remove 90 percent of contaminants. It took two years, but the EPA finally agreed -- for the first time in history -- to waive liability for a nonprofit to do a site cleanup.

So successful has the American Fork Canyon project been that a Good Samaritan law has now been proposed to Congress, which would allow nonprofits and others to clean up privately owned land without fear of liability. The law could result in new regulations as early as next year, according to Trout Unlimited.

Caleb Warnock can be reached at 443-3263 or cwarnock@heraldextra.com.

This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page A1.