“We don’t think that converting (the road for public use) would necessarily result in a change in noise regulations,” he said. “If the road becomes a public road, the noise regulations might be even stricter. It was as if to say, ‘You should be careful what you wish for.’ That’s why they wanted to open the road to the public, but in the end, even stricter noise regulations might have been put in place.”

“I try to hit it from every angle”

Zimmerly received a building permit from the Gorge Commission in 1993 and mined on the site for four years until he suspended mining in the winter of 1996-97 when severe winter storms in Clark County caused landslides and other damage, including a “catastrophic” discharge of sediment-laden mining wastewater from the Zimmerly property onto adjacent properties and into the ecologically sensitive Steigerwald Lake National Wildlife Refuge and Gibbons Creek, destroying nearly a mile of river salmon habitat, according to Baker.

As a result, the Washington State Department of Ecology fined Zimmerly and Nutter nearly $200,000.

“And that’s basically when mining stopped,” Baker said. “For 20 years there was basically no mining, and because they stopped mining for more than a year, they lost their permit.”

Despite a lack of permits, the Nutter Corporation began mining in the area again in 2017. According to FCG, Nutter’s double-loaded gravel trucks made more than 200 round trips per day, leaving deep ruts in Southeast 356th Avenue and other local thoroughfares, spilling sediment into local waterways and “terrorizing residents with noisy and dangerous truck traffic.”

“It was a nonstop noise,” Rachel Grice told The Post-Record. “There were up to four (trucks) on the road at once and they were passing each other. And because the road is so steep, they had to use their brakes. We could hear this loud gear shifting and the volume of the engine. A lot of them had screeching brakes and were making this eerie, high-pitched squealing noise the whole way through.”