WHEN IT COMES TO MINING, A TALE OF TWO STATES
Published in the June 21, 2025 Edition
“A state border does not necessarily mean the ecosystem is any different,” Allison Weber, Friends of the Inyo Forest and Water Policy Director, told me just before she climbed shotgun into a six-seater plane, acorn earrings dangling beside her face.
I took my place behind her. We were getting ready to take to the air from the Bridgeport airport over the Bodie Hills with EcoFlight, a Colorado-based flight company specializing in public land advocacy. Friends of the Inyo has partnered with EcoFlight for about a decade, and this was my second flight with them.
My first flight was over Conglomerate Mesa, an area so hotly commodified for its gold prospects that Klusmire’s article on K2 Gold/Mojave Precious Metals’ most recent exploration quest made the Sheet’s front page alongside protesters’ quippy signs last week.
The Bodie Hills area is the northern sister of the Mesa, born of the same mineral strip and similarly vulnerable to mining threats. On my flight over the Mesa, I was in the back of a packed cabin. On Tuesday at Bridgeport, the back seats were free.
While in the air, I saw what Weber was alluding to. Lynn Boulton of the Sierra Club sat to my left and gave a comprehensive tour of the hills as we swept over the Bridgeport Reservoir and swooped between Potato Peak and Bodie Mountain. It was a perfect picture of pristine, rolling hills … until we crossed over to Nevada.
That’s where most of the drill pads are. Five ongoing or upcoming exploratory mining sites in the Bodie Hills sit just over the state line. Exploratory mining looks to sample places where there are assumed gold deposits.
Advocacy groups, such as Friends of the Inyo and the Sierra Club, oppose exploratory mining because it can cause habitat destruction, displace or harm species like the bi-state sage-grouse, mule deer, or rare plants, and create an avenue for justifying the expansion to full mining operations.
The California land in Bodie is protected by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) because it is designated as a Wilderness Study Area. In contrast, the Nevada land is part of the Humboldt-Toiyabe U.S. Forest Service Land, which has fewer protections.
In 2010, Cougar Gold sought to pursue drilling on the California side, but as Boulton explained, the protections were “just too restrictive,” and the company pulled out after drilling just three locations.
Another company – Paramount Gold/Radius Gold – attempted to explore near Beauty Peak on the California side, but it only received a hand-sampling permit for the work. In 2022, the State Lands Commission placed a three-year moratorium on mineral withdrawals for the Section 16 parcel in the Bodie Hills while evaluating its eligibility for the National Register of Historic Places.
Paramount Gold has since continued its gold hunt on the Nevada side, and as of 2022–2023, the company began substantial drilling across several sites, accessed by helicopter. That site is called “Bald Peak.”
Hecla Nevada/Klondex, operates a separate drill site, “Sawtooth Ridge,” on the Nevada side behind Aurora Cemetery. The company has planned up to 16 drill pads, and drilled three. Active road construction and pad development are ongoing.
Headwater Gold operates a third site on the Nevada side, “Spring Peak,” which sits on the southern slope of Aurora Peak. It has drilled 9 of its planned 23 sites.
Both Hecla Nevada and Headwater Gold have proposed new, separate mining exploration efforts in Bodie, and the Hecla Nevada plan, the “Polaris Project,” is the biggest one the area has ever seen. The project aims to drill 250 sites over 10 years, with 102 locations currently identified and the remaining sites contingent upon the findings.
This is the most significant exploratory drilling effort in the Bodie Hills to date, roughly five times larger than the Spring Peak, Sawtooth, and Bald Peak projects combined.
Halfway through the flight, the plane circled the Borealis mine, an example of the full mining operations performed when extractive mining proves results.
The mine is a crater in the hilside, with piles of dirt stacked nearby; it was created using cyanide leaching, the most popular modern extraction method, wherein the material is removed, and gold particles are separated through chemical extraction.
The four tribes that surround the Bodie Hills – the Bridgeport Indian Colony, the Mono Lake Kutzadika’a Tribe, the Walker River Paiute Tribe, and the Yerington Paiute Tribe – are petitioning the Secretary of the Interior and the Secretary of Agriculture for protection of the land.
The area is “loaded” with cultural resources, Boulton said as we descended for landing.
The Friends of Inyo’s current goal is to push for a higher standard of environmental assessment for exploratory drilling. But, as Weber said after we stepped out of the plane, “nothing is at play right now.”
Any sense of sanctity for public land conservation feels like a far reach under the Trump administration, in which Senate Republicans recently released a bill, the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” advocating for the largest single sale of BLM and USFS land in modern history.
In the meantime, advocacy groups like the Sierra Club and Friends of the Inyo want to see more people “outraged” by the drilling, Boulton said, hoping that public protest will sway federal lawmakers.
