FOREVER A TEACHER
Mike Prather moved to Inyo County in 1972 to teach with his wife, Nancy.
They taught at a small, two-room schoolhouse in the Park Service area of what was then Death Valley National Monument. The faculty had been in search of a married couple—single people weren’t staying long enough. And the Prathers, certainly, didn’t want to leave. “The desert was really making an impression on us,” Prather remembers.
“We drove down there oi a Volkswagen bus with no air conditioning. We used a spray bottle to keep us cool and moved in July of 1972. And it was hot. We got there in the middle of the night and the swamp cooler wasn’t hooked up yet to where it would run. We slept inside, and it was 92 degrees, I remember.”
He taught 4th through 6th grade. Nancy taught kindergarten.
“We taught the Park Service kids, and the Timbisha kids, and the people that worked for the Furnace Creek Ranch,” says Prather. “The sheriffs, the highway patrol—we taught their children.”
The Prathers taught the miners’ children, too. At the time, there was a mining installation project of a 700 foot shaft just outside the boundaries of Death Valley. As Prather remembers, the miners had come to quarry borate minerals from the area.
“We had a lot of hard rock mining families there,” says Prather, “and it was just great.”
It’s a story that would drive Edward Abbey to envy, and maybe, an anecdote you would not expect to hear from Prather.
A schoolteacher by day, Prather moonlit as a “student of natural history” during those years. Since, he’s made a career out of environmentalism, having previously chaired the Inyo County Water Commission and having served as the former secretary for the local land-use protection organization, Friends of the Inyo.
Prather has spent most of his life devoted to the advocacy of environmental legislation. Despite having moved out of Death Valley in 1980, and into Lone Pine, Prather has maintained strong ties to his first home in Inyo County. In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, Prather lobbied for the expansion of Death Valley by approximately 1.3 million acres, and the change in designation for the area from Death Valley National Monument to Death Valley National Park. In October 1994, when President Clinton approved those modifications through the California Desert Protection Act and signed into law that 90% of the territory would be protected wilderness, Prather was on the advisory committee for the park.
And he’s done a lot of work on “bird issues,” particularly those unique to the Owens Lake territory. Prather had a heavy hand in the lake’s Dust Control Project—a successful mitigation initiative against the longstanding environmental consequences faced in the Eastern Sierra by LA’s water use.
“It’s really a habitat issue,” explained Prather, who is also a member of the Eastern Sierra Audubon Society. “Now, tens of thousands of migrating birds every spring and fall are coming through Owens Lake, once again, like they did in the old days—drawn by the food and water that’s there.”
In July of 2022, The Los Angeles Department of Water & Power (LADWP) announced that it had achieved the compliance standards, as mandated by the Dust Control Project, by reaching more than 99% dust containment.
But most recently, Prather has become a staunch advocate for mining regulation in Inyo County, particularly within the Conglomerate Mesa Region.
I first heard Prather speak at an Inyo County Board of Supervisors meeting a few weeks ago—a meeting covered in The Sheet’s December 2nd issue. The floor had opened up to public comment in response to the approval of a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) concerning exploratory drilling at the so-called “Mojave property”—a tract of public lands near the mesa, on which Mojave Precious Metals, a subsidiary of K2 gold, has won exploratory mining approval.
Prather spoke of Father Crowley. His contention was that the lake’s namesake, and Owens Valley champion, would not have been in support of any project that risked bankrupting Inyo County of its natural beauty.
There are few men as devoted and articulate to that which they are passionate for, as Prather. There are few men that can historicize a landscape as well.
“It’s an incredibly beautiful place,” says Prather. “And also a place with so much history for the indigenous Paiute-Shoshone Tribe. One of their passages over to Death Valley left Owens Lake, near Keeler, and went up through Conglomerate Mesa.”
According to Prather, Conglomerate Mesa was also the site of intensive charcoal production and stone masonry activity in the late 19th century. Charcoliers would produce the stuff from pinyon trees, and bring them down to Cerro Gordo as fuel to run the smelters.
“It was the largest historic silver mine production in California history,” says Prahter. “And it bankrolled Los Angeles at the time—took it from a dirt street with sleeping dogs type of place to a real, true city.”
The irony.
But whatever vital role Conglomerate Mesa played in the mining operations of Cerro Gordo, until recently, interest in its own mining potential has remained dormant.
As Prather explained, there have been mining claims in the area from the larger multinational corporations for decades.
The type of mining project proposed by Mojave Precious Metals is called open-pit, cyanide heap leaching. According to the Washington State Department of Natural Resources, the process recovers precious metals, like gold, by trickling a diluted cyanide solution through low-grade ore—the heap. It percolates through the heap before dissolving what gold there is to find. The cyanide solution, “pregnant” with precious metals, is then processed to recover the gold.
The naturally oxidizing conditions of the arid, American west are ideal for cyanide heap leach mining. But those same conditions are also what make reclamation of the land, in mining’s wake, difficult.
“Restoration is a virtual impossibility,” asserts Prather. “There is no soil. There’s very little water in these desert lands. And the roads up there that a previous exploration company left behind stand out like a sore thumb.”
But as Inyo County Planning Director, Catherine Richards, stated in the meeting at which Prather gave public comment, the county’s hands are tied.
“Inyo County has absolutely no permitting authority over this project,” said Richards. “We’re gonna have to participate, whether we like it or not.”
Prather confirms: “It’s a federal decision. Inyo County can’t stop it, but they can have a local position—a new way of thinking that isn’t stuck in the past.”
The fear is that a successful exploratory mining project by Mojave Precious Metals will seed interest into a broader tract of the region’s land. From Prather’s perspective, and at a philosophical level, silence from the county may send a signal of leniency.
“That’s why I appealed to them,” says Prather. “Inyo County could have a policy that says ‘We don’t support this kind of heap leach mining in our county,’ or, ‘there are some places that should not be mined.’ And Conglomerate Mesa is one of them.”
According to Prather, recent advocacy work on behalf of the mesa has called for erecting the region as a national monument, granting it enhanced management and protection.
“Right now, it has wilderness to the north of it, the Inyo Mountains to the south of it, and on the east, immediately, is Death Valley National Park,” says Prather. “The concern is that if gold or copper is found there—enough of it to make a lot of money—they’d be digging these giant holes capable of taking down entire mountain ranges.”
But, Prather urges us to remember, protection of Conglomerate Mesa does not necessitate radical environmentalism. As the California-native pointed out, there is already active mining on Owens Lake—soda ash production made possible by the completion of the Carson and Colorado Railroad into Owens Valley of 1883, and now collected by the British-Australian multinational mining corporation, Rio Tinto. In fact, the U.S. Geological Survey lists 1,488 active mines in Inyo County.
“There is mining, and most of it isn’t really opposed by anybody,” says Prather. “You can’t claim that environmentalists are frothing at the mouth. We’re not talking about whether or not mining is okay. We’re talking about how and where. Conglomerate Mesa is not the place.”
Ironically, Prather ended our conversation about the mesa with what sounded like the lead-up to a good joke.
“A long time ago, two bachelors walked all the way from Death Valley, over the mountains,” he said. “They walked all the way down to the Saugus/Newhall area so they could get mules and food. And there was a family there, that had fallen into the dry waterfall—Manly Falls, in Panamint Valley. The bachelors went in and rescued the family. That waterfall—it’s a small part of our history. But it was destroyed when the Briggs Gold Mine was opened. And now it’s gone. We can’t get it back.”
What Prather fears, it seems, is that we will not take care of our history. That we will not learn from those parts of its arc that bent the wrong ways. His fear is that we will not trust, as Father Crowley did, that the beauty of the county has merit enough to sustain its economy, without the foolhardy promise of gold.
And if we don’t?
“Then we have to scramble, and hold onto what sustains us—the landscape, itself,” says Prather. “Or at least, what of it there’s left.”
