WICKES -- The little yellow house sits like an island amid a sea of excavation. On this blustery winter day, the home's former front yard is a gaping 15,000-square-foot, 5-foot-deep pit and a large chunk of the mountain out back is gone. A single leafless tree stands nearby.

But shortly, both the front and back yards will be filled with uncontaminated dirt, where sod or native grasses will eventually grow. Similar scenarios are being played out at many of the few remaining homes in this former boom town 20 miles south of Helena.

Wickes blasted to life more than 100 years ago, with the discovery of silver in 1864. Like many mining communities, the boom was followed by a bust, leaving a shell of the former town and a legacy of waste rocks and mill tailings contaminated with elements including mercury, arsenic and lead.

That legacy led the state Department of Environmental Quality to list the Wickes Smelter as number four on its priority list of 300 sites identified for remediation in Montana. Since the smelter site is now a mix of private and public lands, the state agency paired with the Bureau of Land Management to put together a $2 million clean-up project for about 50 acres in and around the town.

Not many people still reside in Wickes -- only about eight families live there now -- so it's not as if the site poses an imminent health threat to a large population. But a number of factors combined to put the site near the top of the DEQ priority list.

"The potential impacts to the environment ... put it on the list," said Bill Botsford, a reclamation specialist with DEQ. "The nearby residences bump it up higher, and the levels of contamination bumped it up even higher to the number four position."

Mike Browne, BLM project manager, adds that the waste rock piles draw area children to them like sand piles do.

"Kids will spend all summer building in the waste rock piles, so the main danger is to them when they're in there playing," Browne said. "There's also a real hazard to local people from dust blowing from the piles."

The contamination includes lead levels of up to 44,400 parts per million (ppm) in the debris from the former Wickes Smelter; mercury that is visible to the naked eye; and anywhere from 75 to 64,000 ppm of arsenic around the small town.

Botsford said those numbers are "near percentage concentrations," which is an incredibly high amount of contaminants in the soils.

"For example, if you have 10,000 parts per million, that equals about one part per hundred," Botsford said. "So when we have arsenic at 6½ percent, that means for every 100 pounds of material, you have 6½ pounds of arsenic."

Arsenic is a known carcinogen. Mercury can cause birth defects, and high levels can fatally injure the brain and kidneys. Lead can cause a wide range of health impacts, from behavioral problems and learning disabilities, to seizures and death.

To limit the hazards, state and federal officials put together a plan to deal with the mining remains. The plan basically involved digging a 90,000 cubic yard hole, putting down an impermeable liner and filling the pit with the dozens of piles of waste rocks and tailings, then covering it with another impermeable liner plus soil and vegetation.

But the simple plan has some complexities.

First, they needed to find a place for the repository. That came as a 44-acre donated parcel from Montana Tunnels, which still operates an open-pit gold mine near Wickes.

"We've been involved in a number of cleanups here, because we own parts of these (and other cleanup sites nearby) and have actively been participating in the cleanup work," said John Schaefer, environmental manager for Montana Tunnels.

It took a few months and some wrangling with attorneys to turn the site over to the BLM, since there's always concerns over future liabilities for these waste sites. In addition, Montana Tunnels' parent company was working through bankruptcy filings, so a judge had to approve the land transfer.

An archaeologist also needed to inspect the site to ensure that nothing of historical significance would be impacted, and ground-penetrating radar searched a section near a small graveyard to confirm that excavation work wouldn't turn up any unmarked graves.

Once these hurdles were cleared, the final of three smokestacks at the Wickes Smelter was demolished and in September, the heavy equipment began excavating what will be a five-acre repository on the 44-acre donated site.

Last week, the town was abuzz with bulldozers, backhoes and dump trucks. Browne estimates that 900 tons of hazardous waste, from the smelter smokestack, will be trucked to a disposal facility in Oregon. Another 90,000 cubic yards of smelter wastes, waste rock and contaminated residential yard soils will be put in the on-site repository. The pit also has a special cell in which another 600 cubic yards of mercury waste will be placed.

Browne said the plan is to have the majority of the work on the Wickes Smelter Site completed in December, although some of the revegetation work will have to wait until spring.

"Once this is done, most people won't recognize that anything was there," Schaefer said.

People did suffer a little heartburn over removing the final smelter smokestack -- one of the last remaining vestiges of the former mining era -- but Browne said they'll keep a few items intact, like one of the charcoal kilns, and possibly erect some interpretive-type signs that discuss Wickes' past.

"We investigated the stack, and looked at what would be needed to stabilize it," Botsford said. "But the amount to save it -- about $200,000 -- wasn't worth it, plus there it posed a safety risk because it could fall down at any time."

And the work has the support of the few hardy residents remaining in Wickes. Monty DeMers said that despite the disruption to the town, the neighbors he's talked to like what's happening.

"The (smelter stack) was kind of a landmark, but I won't miss it. It's kind of a safety thing," DeMers said. "I think most people are appreciative of the effort they're making."

Reporter Eve Byron can be reached at 447-4076.