NEAH BAY — Visitors to Shi Shi Beach call its natural splendors priceless.
Not so the mineral riches that lie beneath it.
Shi Shi overlies millions — perhaps billions — of dollars in gold, platinum, oil and natural gas.
Olympic National Park owns the surface of the 2-mile-long beach and the forested headlands behind it, but three brothers from Mount Vernon own the mineral rights beneath.
While the brothers say they don’t want to mar Shi Shi’s beauty, they want to sell their holdings at a fair market price that they set at $30 million, according to their agent, Craig Gagnon of Clallam Bay.
Their price tag is a fraction of the gross revenue that could be dug or pumped from under Shi Shi, Gagnon says.
He estimates the value at $2 billion, relying on a century-old U.S. Geological Survey, a contemporary geophysicist’s report and the National Park Service’s own estimate he obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
Contrary to a report by the Environmental Working Group watchdog organization that appeared in Sunday’s Peninsula Daily News, the Watson brothers don’t just hold claim to the minerals, gas and oil.
They own them outright, said Gagnon and Art Watson, one of the brothers. Their holdings lie below 60 acres of beach and 120 acres of timber.