Lone Pine, population 1,882, lies along a stretch of California highway framed by the vast Inyo mountains and a sweeping desert landscape of sagebrush and dunes.

It’s the type of small town tourists drive through en route to Death Valley,; where hikers get a motel room between Pacific Crest Trail treks. But amid the quiet downtown strip of bars and shops, there are signs of a battle brewing under the town’s sleepy surface.

“Support local exploration and mining,”; “Responsible mining helps us all get outside,”; “Mining gets you there,” read stickers on the storefront of Mojave Precious Metals, a local gold exploration company. At an office around the corner, signs that say “No Gold Mining” and “Protect Conglomerate Mesa” are visible from the street.

The Conglomerate Mesa in question lies 15 miles east of Lone Pine: a dry, 14,000 acre mountainous desert dotted with piñon and Joshua trees and surrounded by boulders. Shades of dusty greens, browns and reds stretch for miles. Aside from the wind, the only sounds are lizards and birds moving from shrubs to rocks. The feeling is of a place that has been unchanged for millennia.

Mojave Precious Metals, a subsidiary of Canadian gold exploration company K2 Gold, has set its sights on Conglomerate Mesa as its next venture. The company says that the area is home to a massive quantity of high-quality gold and mineral deposits zigzagging through the mountains, and has spent more than seven years trying to unearth them.

Now, their efforts are bearing fruit. On 8 April, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which manages the area, issued its final approval for K2 Gold’s plans, a 6,000 hectare site dubbed the Mojave Project.

The company wasted no time. Construction of drill pads is underway, helicopters trailing lumber back and forth to drill sites from the Lone Pine Airport. “The setup is complete. The next chapter starts sooner than you think,” reads a video posted by K2 Gold the day BLM approved the exploration project.

Exploratory drilling is typically a prelude to mining. If the gold is good, years down the line, K2 Gold can sell the area off for a hefty price.

There’s something of a new gold rush under way in the American west, after Donald Trump’s Unleashing American Energy Act legally required BLM to approve projects such as K2’s, and reclassified gold and silver as critical minerals for mining. With demand for gold at record levels and new mining projects approved in California, Oregon and Nevada, lands that long enjoyed protection are effectively up for grabs.

“If politics were different, there would be multiple mines on that project,” a K2 adviser said of Conglomerate Mesa shortly before Trump’s election. Now, the political tide is on their side.

According to BLM, the approved version of Mojave Precious Metal’s proposal comes with considerable guardrails – no trucks, only 22 boreholes and millions fewer gallons of water for drilling than the company asked for.

“It allows Mojave Precious Metals, Inc a path to conduct activities on its legally held mining claims while minimizing impacts on public lands,” an agency spokesperson told the Guardian, adding that the project was approved after “extensive environmental analysis, public input, and government‑to‑government consultation with Tribes”.

Some environmental advocates even hail the approved proposal as a win. But Indigenous leaders say any action is a blow. For some, the fight is more urgent than ever.

“This isn’t something that we ever want,” said Esther Fillingame, a monitor for the Paiute Shoshone Tribe, a role that includes accompanying workers to the mountain to ensure no natural or cultural sites are disturbed.

For Fillingame and others, BLM’s approval means it’s not an “if” mining companies come to the mountain, but “when”, forcing tribal leaders to restrategize their resistance.

For now, that work is up to the mountain, said Fillingame. “Hopefully they don’t find anything,” she said.

For years, Lone Pine has been split: between residents who welcome jobs and economic growth promised in the Mojave Project, and a coalition of tribes and environmentalists who say it opens the door to the destruction of life and habitat on the mountain range, which is a refuge for threatened species and a sacred site for Indigenous people.

K2 Gold has reason to be confident their work will pay off. Company geologists continue to monitor the area, and a previous, smaller-scale drilling project in the area yielded promising samples from deeper underground.

In press releases, K2 Gold calls the area “one of the most compelling undeveloped oxide gold and polymetallic exploration assets in the western United States”. Anthony Margarit, the CEO of K2 Gold, has said publicly that the area could eventually “host multiple mines”, and has estimated that it could be 10-15 years for a full-scale mine to be built. Margarit declined to be interviewed for this article. Margarit declined to be interviewed for this article.

Changing nature of prospecting

In some ways, Lone Pine is frozen in time – and so are the mountains around it.

The Eastern Sierra has been a draw for mining since the Gold Rush of the 1840s, which led to the founding of towns all along the mineral and water-rich Owens valley. Lone Pine was one of them, set up in 1861 as a hub for workers in nearby gold and silver mines.

In a few short years, dirt roads cut through ancient Paiute Shoshone travel routes and settlers’ grazing cattle ate up much of the tribe’s food sources. Increasing tension between white settlers and local tribes led to the killing of hundreds of Indigenous people.

When mineral deposits started to dwindle in the early 1900s, as quickly as they were built, some towns became ghost towns, and mineshafts dug deep into the hills were abandoned.

Today, much of the Inyo Mountains is Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land. In 1872, westward expansion-hungry lawmakers passed a pro-mining law that still holds: if a prospector finds gold or another valuable mineral on federal land, they can stake a claim, file it with the bureau, and 20 acres around the site are theirs for a small fee.

In 1872, a prospector was a man with a floppy-brim hat and pickaxe. In 2026, it’s a billion-dollar company and 1,200-lb steel drill rigs. A company can buy up massive amounts of claims to build out a site such as the Mojave Project, which has been approved for 76 drill holes on 22 sites around the mountains.

Such concerns were on display at a town hall in Lone Pine last summer, during a public comment period before the BLM’s decision. The hall was over capacity, every seat full and people spilling out of the building.

More than 150 people came out for the night, many who have worked side by side in the effort for years: masked off-the-gridders in camouflage, tribe members whose ancestors shaped Owens valley, seasoned environmental advocates, US army veterans, shop owners, university botanists and BLM employees.

Among the speakers was Brent Underwood, a local celebrity and owner of Gordo Ghost Town, once the most productive silver mine in the state. A big chunk of K2’s mining claims sit right along his property.

Underwood fears that mining gold from deposits such as Conglomerate Mesawould eventually require an open-pit heap leach mine. It’s a common method for getting gold out of large areas of rock, and cheaper than other forms of mining – a trench is cut into the earth, and dirt is transferred to nearby pools of cyanide to sort fragments of metal from dirt.

It’s also the same process used at several massive mining operations just a few miles south, including Castle Mountain Mine, which was just fast-tracked this year for expansion by BLM. Open-pit heap leach mines are known to cause environmental and public health issues and have been banned in Montana and several countries.

“I seriously question the wisdom of inviting this person in as our new neighbor,” said Underwood at the town hall.

Conflicting views

Most at the town hall were relative newcomers to the mountain. The Paiute Shoshone have been telling its story for almost 200 years.

Kathy Bancroft, an elder of the Lone Pine Paiute Shoshone Tribe, was a major part of the effort against mining interests on Conglomerate Mesa until she died in January at 71.

Bancroft spoke with a chatty familiarity that put people at ease. Cancer recently kept her in an electric wheelchair or in bouts of sleeping off pain in bed. Speaking to the Guardian before her death, Bancroft recalled previous mining companies meeting with the tribes on the Lone Pine Paiute Shoshone Reservation just a few miles from the mountain.

“They were real confident they could win us over,” said Bancroft, chuckling. “That’s immediately what they tried to do. They even offered the tribe money. We never took it.”

Conglomerate Mesa mountain range is sacred to all the local tribes, said Bancroft, including the nearby Bridgeport Indian Colony, Fort Independence Community of Paiute Indians, Kern Valley Indian Community, Bishop Paiute Tribe, Mono Lake Kootzaduka’a Tribes and Lone Pine Paiute Shoshone Tribe.

Along with being a haven for wildlife, Bancroft said, the area was traversed for centuries by tribes migrating to cooler climates during summer, hunting big horn sheep and for gathering nutrient-dense pine nuts from piñon trees. Two Paiute Shoshone members recently discovered two ancient stone tablets carved into human figures tucked between boulders on the road to a proposed drill site.

When she was a young girl in the 1970s, she accompanied Paiute Shoshone representatives and gold speculators to survey areas they hoped to drill.

“We said: ‘No way. Don’t bring anybody in here.’ And we always stuck by that.”

Different companies came and went – Compass, Newmont, BHP, Timberline, Silver Standard – usually foiled by the challenges of overcoming California’s strict environmental rules. But K2 Gold has stuck around since 2019, through years long environmental reviews and two presidential administrations.

K2 has made assurances that their patience during a lengthy public input process proves they are not like the others. Plus, they have said mining operations will bring workers with money to spend in town.

The Bureau of Land Management’s own figures say with the current method of drilling, the impact on jobs in Lone Pine and Inyo county will be small, since the specialized skills involved in drilling would require outside hires. Over an estimated 10-month period, Mojave Precious Metal’s workforce would include seven employees and local contractors. “Impacts on socioeconomic conditions would be negligible, short-term, and localized,” states BLM’s final environmental impact report.

Still, the argument resonates with some business owners in Lone Pine. While few were open to talking, those who did cited the declining local economy and need for jobs.

Forrest Newman, part-owner of Jake’s Saloon, a bar right on Highway 395, sees mining as just a fact of life.

“You do realize,” said Newman, “Everything: you either mine it, or grow it, or it doesn’t exist.” Makeup, bath salts, Vaseline – a number of substances in everyday objects we use come from mining such as K2’s.

Newman, who moved out to California from the south to work for the state’s transportation department CalTrans, believes more miners would be good for business. Plus, he said, it’s not like there’s anything out there now.

“Im not trying to bash on anybody,” he said. “But, why would you wander up [there]? It’s fucking desert.”

Dignity of the land

On a hot afternoon in September, Jeremiah Joseph and his nephew Seth Tsotsie drove across miles of rocky, washed-out roads to check in on Conglomerate Mesa.

Joseph is a tribal monitor for the Paiute Shoshone, a position provided by the tribe to monitor construction projects. In 2020, K2 began their initial exploration of the Mesa with a 17-borehole project to get samples from deeper into the mountain. Joseph made his way to Conglomerate Mesa at 4am each day, to ensure artifacts such as the stone tablets or petroglyphs weren’t taken or destroyed.

Joseph pointed out signs of native life all over: ancient petroglyphs on a slab of granite right within 2 miles of the drill sites, and, much closer, a rock worn in the middle where pine nuts were ground into flour. Tsotsie, 22, fell behind, collecting pine nuts and Joshua tree roots. He hulled each root to its beet-red insides to weave into a basket.

“It keeps you on your toes,” Joseph said of monitoring. “When I’m on those sites, I’m representing a nation, a history.”

Conglomerate Mesa is home to a host of vulnerable plants – the Inyo Rock Daisy, endemic to the county, gained listing as a threatened species last year. And, it’s a climate refuge for the western Joshua tree, which became protected in 2023. There are 2,000 Joshua trees in the Mojave Project area.

In 2020, Joseph uprooted 38 Joshua Trees out of the K2’s path and planted them in Lone Pine until the company’s work was complete. Then, he settled each one back into its original home.

As afternoon turned to evening on the mesa, Joseph took some time to pray to the mountain before heading back to Lone Pine.

“I’m fighting for the relationship I have with that mountain as it is,” said Joseph. “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.”