BUGGED BY GOLD BUGS
This article was published in the June 7, 2025 edition.
The gold bugs are back and that’s bugging quite a few people.
Despite storming out of Inyo County in a huff in 2020 and closing its Lone Pine office, K2 Gold/Mojave Precious Metals didn’t really leave. The Canadian company kept working with the Ridgecrest office of the Bureau of Land Management on an Environmental Impact Statement detailing the firm’s plans continue its search for gold by drilling up to 120 exploratory bore holes on 30 different sites on Conglomerate Mesa. K2 completed a smaller-scale core drilling project in 2020 on Conglomerate Mesa, a sprawling tract of high desert south of the silver mining ghost town of Cerro Gordo and east of Keeler into the mountains bordering Death Valley National Park.
The announcement of a larger, more complicated exploratory drilling plan brought out scores of protesters and unified opposition to the plan by numerous local and regional environmental organizations. The BLM decided the proposed new drilling would require an EIS, not a much less thorough Environmental Assessment, which was completed for the first drilling operation. That closed K2’s offices in Lone Pine but didn’t shut the door on the company’s efforts to find gold on its thousands of acres of patented mining claims on Conglomerate Mesa.
Predictably, the same coalition that protested the plans in 2020 is preparing a similar campaign to derail the drilling plan. While the current action only involves drilling bore holes, opponents point out the company could eventually mine gold in a huge open pit mine and process the massive amounts of low-grade dirt/ore using a cyanide leech field system which can produce tiny and even microscopic amounts of gold. And the potential for massive environmental devastation, opponents predict.
About 30 people attended an informational meeting about the EIS in Bishop on May 19 hosted by Inyo 350. The EIS is “grossly inadequate,” said Jora Fogg, a June Lake resident working for the Conservation Land Foundation. She worked for the Friends of the Inyo during the first Conglomerate Mesa confrontation.
The BLM’s “preferred alternative,” and the one endorsed by K2, would impact 13 acres in a project area of 2,400-acres on the Mesa. Vegetation would be cleared for about 30 drill pads, where drilling rigs would punch 120 holes about 1,000 feet deep into the Mesa to collect core samples. Those samples will reveal where any recoverable gold is located and provide a rough idea of the amount of gold to be found. The drilling work would take between 10-15 months and with the rigs running day and night, seven days a week.
The project would involve improving and widening about 2.6 miles of roads scratched out by another gold mining company in the 1990s to make them usable for heavy truck traffic. That work would “disturb” another 12 acres, according to the EIS. The old roads are currently blocked off. Reworking those roads would change the character of Conglomerate Mesa, which Fogg called “Wilderness with a small ‘w’.” The BLM states the 22,000 acre mesa is “the largest intact roadless area” overseen by the Ridgecrest BLM office.
The work would require about 2.9 million gallons of water and about 65,000 gallons of diesel fuel. Trucking the drill rigs, water and fuel to the site is a major concern, Fogg said, since access to Conglomerate Mesa uses several narrow dirt roads coming off Saline Valley Road.
Water has always been an issue since the Mesa is a dry, high desert plateau. Fogg said it appears K2 will obtain water from the Darwin Mine, which has a commercial groundwater permit. However, the EIS does not mandate K2 proves it has a secure source of water, she noted.
Comments should point to a different alternative outlined but rejected by BLM and K2 which would have K2 use helicopters to transport drilling rigs, crews and supplies. That would stop any road work and cap drill pad disturbance at about 4 acres. But it would also take longer, up to 8.5 years, and use far more water, 22.5 million gallons.
“It would obviously be far more expensive,” Fogg said. But making the drilling work “as expensive to the company as possible” is also a strategy and could delay or alter the planned work.
Fogg and Maria Jesus, a botanist with the California Botanic Gardens, outlined a number of other issues for opponents to point out.
There are 13 “rare” plants on the mesa, including the Inyo Rock Daisy, which is proposed for state protection as a “threatened” species. The same state action is pending for the scores of Western Joshua Trees on the mesa. And of course, Lynn Boulton of the Range of Light group of the Sierra Club and volunteers have counted the Joshua trees that could be impacted with the road and drilling work. They counted 650 trees that could be damaged or killed, while K2 claims only 60 are in danger.
Conglomerate Mesa also holds ancient indigenous cultural sites and artifacts, but the EIS does not explicitly outline how Native American monitors or archeologists will be available to survey any such discoveries.
The mesa also has a unique geology, Jesus said, holding a “complete Permian Period record,” that would be destroyed if open pit mining is ever allowed.
Opponents could also call for a state-level Environmental Impact Report in addition to the federal EIS. The mesa is an Area of Critical Environmental Concern and designated by California as Desert Natural Conservation Lands. It is unclear what impact the Trump Administration’s effort to prioritize mining on federal lands and streamlining environmental reviews will have the company’s plans, Fogg said.
Fogg predicted the company will continue to seek approvals for additional test drilling sites and work piecemeal to achieve its goal of developing an open pit, cyanide leech field mine. Boulton pointed out K2 has filed for about a half dozen “mill sites” on Conglomerate Mesa, which is a different class of claim then mineral claims.
“It’s going to be a long haul,” concluded Fogg.
The BLM and K2 will hold an open house to take public comments on the EIS on June 10, at Statham Hall in Lone Pine from 5-7 p.m. The deadline for public comments to the Ridgecrest BLM office is June 16.
