Construction of drill pads began soon after the BLM issued its final approval on April 8, with helicopters shuttling lumber from the Lone Pine Airport to drill sites in the Inyo Mountains. The company posted a video the same day saying “the next chapter starts sooner than you think.”
The exploration project, operated by Mojave Precious Metals — a subsidiary of Canadian firm K2 Gold — targets gold and mineral deposits that the company has called “one of the most compelling undeveloped oxide gold and polymetallic exploration assets in the western United States.” The area is covered by a 1872 mining law that allows prospectors to stake claims on federal land for a small fee, a legal framework critics say was written for individual prospectors but now serves billion-dollar corporations.
The BLM said the project was approved with conditions intended to limit its environmental footprint. An agency spokesperson told the Guardian the plan “allows Mojave Precious Metals, Inc a path to conduct activities on its legally held mining claims while minimizing impacts on public lands,” adding that the decision followed “extensive environmental analysis, public input, and government‑to‑government consultation with Tribes.” The agency’s final environmental impact report concluded that impacts on socioeconomic conditions in Lone Pine and Inyo County would be “negligible, short-term, and localized,” estimating the project would employ seven workers and local contractors over a roughly 10-month period.
For Indigenous leaders in the region, the approval marks the beginning of a longer fight.
Esther Fillingame, a tribal monitor for the Paiute Shoshone Tribe, said the approval means the question is no longer “if” mining companies come to the mountain but “when,” forcing tribal leaders to restrategize their resistance. “Hopefully they don’t find anything,” she said.
Jeremiah Joseph, also a Paiute Shoshone tribal monitor, has spent years watching the site. During a 2020 exploratory phase, he uprooted 38 Joshua trees from K2’s path and replanted them after the company’s work was complete. The Mojave Project area contains an estimated 2,000 Joshua trees, a species that gained state protection in 2023. The area is also home to the Inyo Rock Daisy, which was listed as a threatened species last year.
Joseph pointed to signs of native life across the mesa — ancient petroglyphs carved into granite within two miles of the drill sites, a stone worn smooth in the middle where pine nuts were once ground into flour. Two Paiute Shoshone members recently discovered stone tablets carved into human figures between boulders near a proposed drill site. “When I’m on those sites, I’m representing a nation, a history,” Joseph said. He described his work as “fighting for the relationship I have with that mountain as it is. It’s simple as the food that’s up there, or the natural hunting blinds. We’re not giving generations after us a chance to know the land, or give the landscape the dignity it deserves.”
The late Kathy Bancroft, an elder of the Lone Pine Paiute Shoshone Tribe who died in January at 71, had been a central figure in the opposition. She recalled that when mining companies met with the tribe, “they were real confident they could win us over. That’s immediately what they tried to do. They even offered the tribe money. We never took it.”
The project has divided Lone Pine itself. Some business owners welcome the economic potential. Forrest Newman, a part-owner of Jake’s Saloon, said mining is “just a fact of life. Everything: you either mine it, or grow it, or it doesn’t exist.” Newman argued that more miners would be good for business and said the mesa holds little value as it is. “It’s fucking desert,” he said.
Opponents include Brent Underwood, owner of the nearby Cerro Gordo ghost town — once the most productive silver mine in the state. Underwood said he fears that if exploration yields results, the operation could eventually become an open-pit heap leach mine, a method that uses cyanide to extract gold from crushed rock and has been banned in Montana and several countries. “I seriously question the wisdom of inviting this person in as our new neighbor,” Underwood said at a town hall last summer.
A K2 adviser told the Guardian shortly before Trump’s election that “if politics were different, there would be multiple mines on that project.” Now, the political tide has shifted in the company’s favor. Trump’s Unleashing American Energy Act, which reclassified gold and silver as critical minerals, has opened the door to a wave of mining proposals across California, Oregon, and Nevada. K2 Gold CEO Anthony Margarit declined to be interviewed, and requests for comment sent to the company were not returned.
The company has estimated that a full-scale mine could be built within 10 to 15 years of a successful exploration phase. Margarit has said publicly that the area could eventually “host multiple mines.”