The Washington Conservation Voters called Upthegrove "a leader on environmental issues and a rising star in the House." Upthegrove led high-profile environmental initiatives to clean up Puget Sound and to clean up soil at schools and day cares contaminated by a local Asarco copper smelter.
As a Guggenheim engineer, he was the first to apply scientific methods to sampling bulk-tonnage orebodies at the enormous porphyry copper deposit at Bingham Canyon, Utah.
It also held, at some stages, cross-shareholdings in ASARCO, Cominco and Metallgesellschaft.