The Atlas Uranium Mill near Moab as it appeared in May of 1972. Source: DOCUMERICA: The Environmental Protection Agency’s Program to Photographically Document Subjects of Environmental Concern.
The Trump administration has formally cancelled the proposed withdrawal of more than 160,000 acres in the Upper Pecos River Watershed from new mining claims and mineral leasing.
Prompted by local advocacy and New Mexico’s congressional delegation, the Biden administration began the process of protecting the watershed and surrounding mountains east of Santa Fe in 2024. But the Trump administration nipped the process in the bud shortly after taking office by cancelling scheduled public meetings. Now it has officially ended the withdrawal.
For the past several years, Comexico LLC, a subsidiary of Australia-based New World Resources, has been working its way through the permitting process to do exploratory drilling at what it calls its Tererro mining project on more than 200 active mining claims in the watershed. It has met with stiff resistance from locals and regional advocacy groups, partly because mining has a dark history in the Pecos River watershed. In 1991, a big spring runoff washed contaminated mine and mill waste from a long-defunct mine into the upper Pecos River, killing as many as 100,000 trout. That prompted a multi-year cleanup of various mining sites.
The withdrawal wouldn’t have stopped the project outright, because it doesn’t affect existing, active, valid claims. Yet it would have stopped the company from staking more claims and would make it more difficult to develop the existing ones (especially if they haven’t established validity).
I have a saying I coined while writing River of Lost Souls that goes like this: Mining is hard. Putting the earth back together again afterwards is a hell of a lot harder.That’s probably especially true when it comes to mining and milling uranium, given that along with all the other nasty byproducts of mining, it also leaves behind radioactive material. The point was recently driven home by two events:
Meanwhile, over at the cleaned up Durango uranium mill site (now a dog park), the Department of Energy’s most recent verification monitoring report finds that natural uranium flushing in the groundwater beneath the site is happening slower than expected. There’s no reason for concern at this point: Researchers are still confident that uranium concentrations will drop below the compliance goal within the allotted 100-year time period.
I mention it here because of the time-scale involved: The Atlas mill in Moab stopped operating more than 40 years ago, and the cleanup has dragged on for close to two decades. The Durango mill shut down for good in 1963; the massive, years-long, multi-million-dollar cleanup was completed in 1991. And researchers expect it to take another 65 years for the groundwater contamination to finally get back to acceptable levels.
It’s just something to keep in mind when considering new uranium mines and mills.
The back of Glen Canyon Dam circa 1964, not long after the reservoir had begun filling up. Here the water level is above dead pool, meaning water can be released via the river outlets, but it is below minimum power pool, so water cannot yet enter the penstocks to generate electricity. Bureau of Reclamation photo. Annotations: Jonathan P. Thompson
🐟 Colorado River Chronicles 💧
One of the more frustrating things about the Colorado River crisis is that the federal government, which controls the big dams and most of the extensive plumbing system on the river, has hardly given even a clue as to what it might do when Glen Canyon Dam reaches the critical minimum power pool mark as early as this summer.
Will they shut down the hydropower turbines and route all releases through the river outlets, possibly compromising the outlet tubes’ — and the dam’s — structural integrity? Will they “defend” minimum power pool by cutting back releases, thereby putting the Upper Basin in violation of the Colorado River Compact? Or will they drain Upper Basin reservoirs in an effort to maintain minimum power pool while also keeping releases at a level that will keep Lake Mead from dropping too precipitously? Maybe they’ll use the bunker-busting bombs intended for Iran to very quickly blast bypass tunnels through the canyon walls to render the dam obsolete?
The answer is still a mystery, but Interior Secretary Doug Burgum finally hinted coyly about the government’s potential approach (Interior oversees the Bureau of Reclamation, which runs most dams). The Arizona Star’s venerable environmental reporter Tony Davis reports that Burgum told a Tucson roundtable this week:
Okay, I don’t know what that means, exactly, but at least they’re planning to do something. The last statement hints at their intent to defend the minimum power pool on Glen Canyon Dam (lest they’ll lose power generation altogether). We’ll probably learn more during the Glen Canyon Monthly Operations Call in the coming week or two. So stay tuned.
As long as we’re on the subject of the federal government doing something about the Colorado River, when’s Trump going to order his people to open the giant faucet up in Canada and send water gushing down to the Southwest?
This won’t come as a surprise to many people, but it’s now official: March 2026 was the hottest March on record by a lot in the Southwest and beyond. The Upper Colorado River Basin’s average temperature for the month was 46.5° F, or more than 13° higher than the 1895-2026 median. The graph below makes it very clear that the place has been getting hotter over the past fifty years, with the only real break coming in March 2023, when snow was piling up in the mountains.
March 2026 was the hottest March since 1895 by far in the Upper Colorado River Basin. Source: NOAA.
The March scorcher followed the warmest winter and first half of the water year (Oct-March) for most of the West.
The result is clear: Even though precipitation accumulation wasn’t terribly far below normal, the snowpack was. The April 1 snowpack across Colorado was at a record low level, according to this year’s snow course, which is done by manual measurement and so goes back much farther than SNOTEL measurements.
The April 1 snowpack this year was lower than in 1977, 1981, and 2002, the worst winters of the last nine decades, at least. Source: Center for Snow and Avalanche Studies and NRCS.
Early April storms have helped keep the snow around a bit longer in the mountains, but has done little to bolster the snowpack. It’s still at historically low levels.
Arches visitor numbers soared during the Mighty Five campaign, plummeted in 2020 during the first COVID wave, surged in the pandemic’s aftermath, then corrected and plateaued. The correction corresponds with the implementation of the timed-entry reservation system. Source: NPS.
Earlier this year, the Trump administration cancelled the timed-entry reservation system for Arches National Park. The move was inspired in part by complaints from some Moab and Grand County elected officials and business owners who claimed the system had hampered overall visitation to the area, thereby hurting businesses’ bottom lines and diminishing tax revenues.
A new analysis is throwing that reasoning into doubt. And it raises the question of whether visitation to Arches is fueling Moab’s tourism industry, or the community and its amenities are drawing folks to the national park, or something in between. But it also should spur a conversation on who or what a national park should be serving.
During the Cold War, when Moab was primarily a uranium mining and milling town, with a bit of sightseeing, jeep-riding, and river-floating tourism on the side, Arches National Park was relatively quiet, with an average annual visitation of about 250,000 between 1965 and 1986. Winters could be downright empty: During January 1979, the first year monthly counts were recorded, only 2,970 people — or less than 100 per day on average — entered the park.
Domestic uranium production peaked in 1980. In 1984, the massive Atlas uranium mill just down the road from the entrance to Arches National Park shut down, and the industry effectively perished, creating an economic vacuum into which outdoor recreation-oriented tourism could slide. The Groff brothers opened Rim Cyclery in 1983, began renting mountain bikes a year later, and hosted the first Canyonlands Fat Tire Festival and Moab Stage Race (for road bikes) in 1986. The latter included a race from Moab, into Arches National Park, and back, something that would not fly nowadays.
Arches annual visitation also exceeded the 400,000 mark for the first time that year and climbed swiftly thereafter. While it’s difficult to suss out the cause and effect here, it is pretty clear that Arches visitation did not drive Moab’s transformation into a mountain bike and outdoor recreation mecca. If anything, it was the other way around. Arches visitation plateaued in the early 2000s, but Moab and Grand County’s amenities and tourism related sectors — retail trade, real estate, and services — continued to add jobs and in-migration remained strong.
The non-national-park public lands around Moab see far more visitors than Arches National Park each year. Source: BLM.
Arches visitation and Moab’s might as an amenities economy continued to mirror each other. Utah’s Mighty Five marketing campaign helped drive Arches visits from less than 1 million in 2009 to 1.7 million in 2018. This led to packed parking lots, trail traffic jams, interminable waits at the entrance gates as lines of cars spilled out onto the highway for a mile or more, and dozens of instances in which rangers had to turn visitors away because the park simply couldn’t handle any more.
In 2021, a post-Covid surge drove visitation up to 1.8 million, prompting park officials to finally pull the trigger on timed entry, an idea that had been floating around for years. Requiring visitors to reserve their spot would spread the crowds out, at least, while also giving them more predictability. It sucks to drive for hours or even fly across the world to see Delicate Arch, only to get turned away at the gate. The program was launched as a pilot in April 2022, and made permanent the following year. Arches visitation tumbled soon thereafter, dropping to 1.46 million in 2022 and 1.48 million in 2023.
Last spring, Moab resident Matt Hancock presented an analysis to the Grand County commissioners purportedly showing that timed-entry led to the visitation decline, which resulted in a decrease in transient room tax collections. And that decline, he argued, was costing Moab about $45 million annually in direct visitor spending, which then rippled out into the community in the form of lost tax revenue and the services they fund.
Direct visitor spending in Grand County, Utah, dropped off after the COVID surge, but remained above pre-COVID levels through 2024, throwing doubt on claims that Arches’ timed-entry drove the post 2021 decline. Source: Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute County Tourism Dashboard.
Grand County Commissioner Brian Martinez then formulated an “Access and Capacity Enhancement Alternative” plan for managing Arches National Park. It favored expanding infrastructure and packing more crowds into the park, and slammed any sort of “demand restrictions” such as timed-entry, saying Grand County “considers its impact on visitation, the local economy, and the community to be unacceptable.”
Martinez presented the plan to a group of state and federal officials at a closed State of Utah and National Park Service Workshop in Salt Lake City aimed at exploring ways to give local officials more control over public lands. A few months later, reservation systems were nixed at Arches, Yosemite, Glacier, and Rocky Mountain National Parks.
Will this boost visitation and Moab’s economy? Possibly, but not likely, according to yet another look, this one by Moab resident Emily Campbell. She also finds a correlation between Arches visitor number declines and timed entry, but points out that the corresponding transient room tax decreases could be attributed to other factors, such as a shift in visitors’ lodging choices. They may be camping on public lands, for example, or staying in neighboring counties, where hotels and such tend to be less expensive.
Meanwhile, other sectors of the economy have thrived, with food services, retail, and construction taxable sales shooting up even as Arches visitation has lagged. Perhaps it’s a sign that Moab’s economy is diversifying slightly, if only from relying heavily on tourism to also depending on folks that actually live there, but earn their incomes from outside the county.
Rather than trying to build on this diversification, however, Grand County is continuing to throw resources at yet another study aimed at determining the economic impact of timed entry — regardless of the fact that the reservation system has been suspended, at least for now.
Of course, all of this skirts around the deeper and bigger issue: the purpose of national parks. Is it really to bolster gateway communities’ tourism industries and enrich local business owners? Or is it, as the National Park Service’s mission states, to preserve “unimpaired the natural and cultural resources and values of the National Park System for the enjoyment, education, and inspiration of this and future generations”?
That’s what parks officials should be thinking about, first and foremost. They should manage the park for the long-term benefit of the park and the resources there. Secondary to that is its effect on the visitors’ experience. Limiting the number of people traipsing around the park by whatever means will be better for the park (or at least not worse for it). And spreading out the crowds with a reservation system will not only make Arches more enjoyable to visit, but will also make it more predictable. That, in the long run, will be better for the park, for its visitors, and, yes, for the gateway communities, too.
Moab’s tourism industry might be wise to get outside the growth at all costs mindset as well. The place has been adding hotel rooms at an astounding rate, looking to capitalize on the Moab mystique. But there are limits to how much visitation can continue to increase without not only wrecking the surrounding public lands but also diminishing the experience and driving folks away. Who knows, the tourism industry could bust just as hard as uranium mining did 40 years ago.
March certainly went out like a lion, though maybe not in the way that the saying is normally understood. It was hot. Damned hot. I’ll give a more thorough rundown on the heatwave and a final snowpack analysis in a later dispatch (after the next storm system moves through in hopes that it might improve the situation). But for now here’s a few stats from the heat wave.
204; 279: Number of monthly high-temperature records that were broken or tied in Arizona and Colorado, respectively, during the last two weeks of March.
102° F: Temperature at the Phoenix airport on March 18, setting a new monthly record and beating the earliest first 100-degree day by eight days.
105° F: The temperature in Phoenix on March 19, 20, and 21, breaking the March record yet again.
78.8° F: Average temperature in Phoenix for the month of March, 6.5° higher than the previous record high average temperature for the month.
109° F: Recorded temperature in Yuma, Arizona, on March 20.
78° F: Temperature in Del Norte, Colorado, on March 20, a new monthly record.
92° F: Temperature in Trinidad, Colorado, on March 21, smashing the previous monthly record high of 85° set … two days earlier.
Rubble and a cone-shaped butte at Pierre’s Site, a Chacoan great house about ten miles north of Chaco Culture National Historical Park. The area around the site would be re-opened to new oil and gas leases under the Trump administration’s proposal to revoke a Biden-era “buffer zone” around the park. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
The News: The Trump administration is formally proposing to revoke the Biden-era ban on new oil and gas leases within the 10-mile buffer zone around Chaco Culture National Historical Park in northwestern New Mexico. The Bureau of Land Management is accepting public comments for just seven days, with the input period ending April 7.
The Context: When President Theodore Roosevelt wielded the brand new Antiquities Act in 1907 to create Chaco Canyon National Monument, he drew the boundaries around what is now known as “downtown Chaco,” a handful of structures including the 800-room Pueblo Bonito, constructed between the 9th and 12th centuries by ancestors of today’s Pueblo people.
That was merely the center of the Chacoan world, however, which extended over 100 miles outward into the Four Corners region. No one knows if this was a political empire, a religious or cultural society, or a school of architecture, but it is clear that the dozens of Chacoan outliers or “great houses,” along with thousands of smaller sites, shrines, and architectural features with unknown function, did not exist in isolation. They were part of a cultural tapestry woven into the natural landscape. The national monument, in other words, was vastly incomplete, which is especially concerning given that it lies in would become one of the nation’s most heavily drilled oil and gas fields.
Wall at Twin Angels Great House, a Chacoan outlier along the Great North Road with an oil and gas well pad and tanks visible in the background. This site is well outside the 10-mile Chaco buffer zone. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
That’s not to say that Chacoan sites are devoid of protections. The park itself is off-limits to all oil and gas development. Pierre’s Site and several other outliers are part of the Chaco Culture Archaeological Protection Sites Program, and all sites on federal land are shielded by the Archaeological Resources Protection Act and Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act, which requires oil companies to conduct a cultural inventory of all land in the path of development. If the surveyors happen upon a “significant” site, the well pad or road or pipeline must be relocated, if possible, at least 50 to 100 feet away, a process known as “identify and avoid.” Tribes are supposed to be consulted in these cases, as well, though their concerns aren’t always considered.
But “identify and avoid” misses a great deal.
“Even though agencies try to mitigate the impact, it isn’t enough because you’ve literally destroyed the context in which those things exist,” Theresa Pasqual told me several years ago when I was writing about Indigenous resistance to drilling around Chaco. She is the former director of Acoma Pueblo’s Historic Preservation Office, and a descendant of the Pueblo people who occupied the Four Corners region for thousands of years. “Most of our pueblos are still transmitting their migration history through oral means. So when you have development that begins to impact many of these sites — that range in size from the grandeur of Chaco Canyon or Mesa Verde to very small unknown sites that still remain un-surveyed and unknown to the public — they are literally destroying the pages of the history book of the Pueblo people.”
Pierre’s Site, a Chacoan great house about nine miles north of the park’s boundary, illustrates this concept. The site is made up of a collection of thick-walled stone structures built among and in harmony with distinctive shale and sandstone buttes and bluffs. That “page,” or the structures and their immediate surroundings, has been kept intact by the aforementioned protections. But a cluster of well pads, along with pumpjacks, tanks, and associated infrastructure sit less than a half-mile away, and they are visible — and their whir-pop-whir sounds audible — from the site. They not only affect the way one experiences Pierre’s, but also have surely erased some of the important context.
Rubble at Pierre’s Site. Jonathan P. Thompson photo
Pierre’s lies along the Great North Road—the most prominent and visible of several such “roads” in the region—an architectural feature that stretches directly north of Chaco Canyon for 30 miles or more. It may have been a symbolic path through time, connecting old worlds with new, or a reminder of the power Chaco-central wielded over its outliers, or a giant arrow pointing people to a holy place. Chaco scholar Paul Reed calls it “a landscape monument on a large scale.” Yet little effort has been made to protect it. Oil field roads and pipelines cross it in dozens of places, and workers have bulldozed well pads right on top of it, erasing the subtle signs that it was ever there. If something so significant can get plowed under, how many more subtle features—shrines, corn fields, plant-gathering sites, ceremonial areas, flint-knapping spots—have been destroyed indelibly?
It was with the greater context in mind that in 2023, after years of consideration, public meetings, and analysis, President Joe Biden signed Public Lands Order 7923, which withdrew about 336,000 acres of public land from oil and gas leasing for 20 years. Tribal nations with ties to the cultural landscape, environmental advocates, and archaeologists had sought the withdrawal to provide a buffer zone around the national historical park and to add a layer of protection to the associated sites within 10 miles of the park’s boundaries.
Map of the 10-mile buffer zone. Source: All Pueblo Council of Governors.
The withdrawal was incomplete, in that it still covered only a tiny slice of the greater Chaco landscape. Several significant outliers, along with about 20 miles of the Great North Road, remained unprotected. Chaco is also in the middle of what’s known as the Checkerboard, a hodgepodge of land ownership and jurisdictions, which complicates the withdrawal, since it only applies to BLM land. The Checkerboard lies within the Navajo Nation’s borders, but it is not reservation land, and it includes Bureau of Land Management land, state lands, private lands, and Indian allotments, which exist in a sort of limbo between private, tribal, and federal land.
The Navajo Nation initially supported the withdrawal, but when tribal leadership changed, so did its stance. In response to pressure from allotment owners within the buffer zone, who worried that their royalties from drilling would be threatened, the Buu Nygren administration turned against the buffer. While leasing is still allowed on those allotments within the withdrawal area, an oil and gas company is less likely to drill there because they can’t “pool” the allotment resources with those of neighboring federal parcels.
Pumpjack and Haystack Mountain as seen from the “Acropolis” at Pierre’s Site, with “Downtown Chaco” in between (but out of view since it’s in a canyon). This view looks directly south down the Great North Road, which is aligned with the meridian stretching from Haystack Mountain to Mount Wilson in the San Juan Mountains in Colorado. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Project 2025, the right wing’s playbook for the Trump administration, directly called for the Chaco buffer zone’s elimination, and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has been toying with the idea for the last year. Finally, on the last day of March, the administration opened a one-week public comment period, on the proposal to either revoke the buffer zone altogether, or to reduce it to a five-mile radius around the park, which would leave out Pierre’s and other significant sites.
The All Pueblo Council of Governors, Indigenous and environmental advocates, archaeology groups, and New Mexico’s congressional delegation all pushed back on the Trump administration’s move and called for the current buffer zone to be retained.
The Trump administration announced it will move the U.S. Forest Service headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Salt Lake City as part of a “sweeping restructuring of the agency to move leadership closer to the forests and communities it serves.” The shake-up includes:
Moving about 260 employees from Washington HQ to Salt Lake City, and shuffling around another 2,600 staffers;
Eliminating its region-based organizing structure and shifting it to one centered around 15 state-level offices. This will include shuttering regional offices, some of which will be retained for other purposes;
Closing 57 research and development stations, while retaining 20, eight of which are in Western states;
As for firefighting, a Forest Service press release noted:
Administration officials say the overhaul is aimed at making the agency, which is a branch of the U.S. Agriculture Department, more nimble and efficient. Yet it has not provided an analysis of how such a vast restructuring would accomplish those goals, or how much money it would save. It comes about a year after the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE, fired about 3,400 Forest Service employees, or more than 10% of the agency’s total workforce.
It’s all part of a larger departmental overhaul designed to “bring the USDA closer to its customers,” according to a USDA memorandum from last year. Customers? Do they mean the extractive industries? The American people? Or what? Either way, it seems like strange terminology for a government agency to be using.
In reality, as Christine Peterson reports in High Country News, the overhaul is doing little except sowing confusion and concern among agency staffers and observers.
These maps show where the new state offices will be after the reorganization is complete. Source: USDA.
Which research facilities will survive the overhaul (below). Source: USDA.
As I’ve written here before, I don’t see moving public land agencies out of Washington to be an unmitigated disaster in and of itself. And contrary to some takes, it won’t automatically lead to wholesale clearcutting of the West’s forests. Forest Service and BLM higher-ups don’t need to be close to Capitol Hill or the White House to do their jobs, especially in the Zoom age. And it wouldn’t hurt to get the Forest Service Chief or the BLM Director out on the landscapes they oversee a bit more often, where perhaps they can see the consequences of projects or policies they may sign off on. Utah may be a questionable location, given the state’s leaders hostility toward public land management, but Salt Lake City is a fairly progressive place, and the likes of Sen. Mike Lee will have just as much access to agency leaders in D.C. as they would in SLC.
That said, if such a move is not done correctly, it can be disastrous. Take Trump’s first-term relocation of the Bureau of Land Management’s headquarters to Grand Junction, Colorado, in 2019. That led to a de facto agency housecleaning; many senior staffers chose to resign or move to other agencies rather than uproot their lives and families and move across the country, and only a handful of workers ended up in the Colorado office, which shared a building with oil and gas companies. A vast storehouse of institutional knowledge and expertise was lost, and virtually nothing was accomplished.
We’re likely to see the same sort of dynamic playing out with this move, even though SLC is larger, more cosmopolitan, and has a bigger airport than GJC. Plus, the USFS overhaul is far more than a mere HQ move. Shuttering nearly 60 research and development facilities, many of which are tied to universities or colleges, will have a major impact, even if their functions and staff are moved elsewhere. Ditto with the regional-to-state office shuffle (the point of which is what, exactly?).
And, this is all happening as the administration makes a push to return the Forest Service to its timber plantation era, which ran from the 1950s through the ’80s. During that time, logging companies harvested 10 billion to 12 billion board-feet per year from federal forests, while for the last 25 years, the annual number has hovered below 3 billion board-feet. Now, Trump, via his Immediate Expansion of American Timber Production order, plans to crank up the annual cut to 4 billion board-feet by 2028. How? By declaring an “emergency” that allows the agency and logging companies to bypass environmental laws. Never mind that the infrastructure and demand don’t necessarily exist to carry out this plan.
Rollins issued a memo last year declaring that the threat of wildfires, insects and disease, invasive species, overgrown forests, the growing number of homes in the wildland-urban interface, and more than a century of rigorous fire suppression have contributed to what is now “a full-blown wildfire and forest health crisis.” And she expanded the “emergency situation” acreage from 67 million acres under Biden, to almost 113 million acres, or 59% of all Forest Service lands, opening it up to streamlined forest “management,” aka timber operations.
🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫
I’m calling it: The Dolores River in Dolores reached peak spring runoff of 1,090 cubic feet per second on March 26. If this holds (and, yes, there is a chance that April showers will bring big May flows), then it will be the earliest peak on record by far. This is more an indication of how intense and unusual the end-of-March heat wave was than of how scant the snowpack was. It was the fourth lowest peak flow on record, behind 2002, 1977, and 2018.
The good news: The April 1 storm gave the snowpack a big boost. The bad news: In most places the snow water equivalent remains below that of the same date in 2002, which had been the worst snow year on record. The same pattern is evident in other San Juan Mountain river basins, but the picture looks a little better at higher elevation SNOTEL stations. Source: USDA NRCS.
Silverton, Colorado’s weather watcher Fred Canfield reports on a welcome burst of moisture at the high country burg in early April, writing:
Parting Cheeseburger Query
Four years ago, I asked you kind readers (or at least the ones that were around back then), for your recommendations on the best independent bookstores and green chile cheeseburgers in the West so I could add them to the Land Desk Green Chile Atlas. I know, it’s kind of weird to combine the two, and I apologize to all vegan booksellers that this pairing may offend (but I will add that vegan burgers are included, too).
Now I figured I’d come back and not only remind you that the Atlas exists, but also ask for updates, new book or green chile-related finds. So fire away!
Storefront, Tierra Amarilla, New Mexico, with slogans remembering the 1967 Tierra Amarilla Courthouse Raid by Reies Lopez Tijerina to protest the federal governments theft of Mexican land grants. Now a Canadian company is proposing to explore for uranium near Canjilon. Ian M. Thompson photo.
The so-called uranium mining renaissance mostly remains in the hype phase. There’s plenty of talk of acquisitions and exploratory drilling and purportedly spectacular finds, but — with a few exceptions — there’s very little action. Even existing mines that have been in “standby” mode for years, supposedly just waiting for market conditions to improve, still aren’t shipping any ore to the mill.
But that doesn’t dim the buzz any. Not only is it intensifying, but it’s spreading out geographically. Most of the drilling and speculative claim-staking is happening in the Lisbon Valley in southeastern Utah and surrounding areas, along with a handful of mining proposals in the Grants uranium belt in New Mexico. Now Gamma Resources is going a little further afield by collecting claims on U.S. Forest Service land in the Chama River watershed in northern New Mexico.
The Canadian firm’s 4,520-acre Mesa Arc Project lies about five miles south of the village of Canjilon. While this was never a uranium mining hot spot, the USGS mineral data system does include a uranium prospect here by the name of Horney Toad or Lucky Dog, though it doesn’t appear to have been a producer.
So far, the company has filed a notice of intent with the Carson National Forest proposing to drill 10 to 12 exploratory holes and construct drill pads and about 800 feet of new access road. But the forest has yet to formally launch the review process. Gamma also says it has hired SWCA Environmental Consultants to conduct an archaeological and cultural resources survey of the area.
Locals aren’t all that excited about the prospect of a uranium mine in their backyard. Source NM’s Patrick Lohmann reports that Moises Morales, a Rio Arriba County commissioner, Canjilon resident, and long-time land grant activist, is mobilizing opposition to the project.
It would behoove Gamma Resources to look into the history of the area to see what a formidable force they are up against. The Chama Valley is famous for its fierce resistance to outsiders trying to usurp their land — be it real estate developers, the federal government, or, I suppose, a mining company.
***
One company, Disa, is looking to produce uranium not by digging up ore, but by using something called high-pressure slurry ablation (HPSA) to extract the mineral from historic mine waste rock piles. Only it appears their attempts to get the novel technology off the ground is facing some hurdles.
In March, Aura Grit LLC filed an application with the BLM to use Disa’s HPSA process on the October pile, an abandoned mine located south of Gateway, Colorado, on a mesa above John Brown Canyon. But shortly after the agency began reviewing the proposal, Disa backed out, at least temporarily, and decided to make the technology’s debut at the smaller Mary Ann uranium mine waste pile in Montrose County. The plan of operations is not yet available.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s environmental review of the Disa’s proposal to remediate abandoned mine dumps with HPSA describes the technology as involving …“… mobile units that use high-pressure water streams to remove source material from the mine waste, resulting in coarse material and fines concentrates. Disa expects that the coarse material would meet NRC requirements for release and would be reintegrated into the mine site soils. The fines concentrates would be transported to licensed low-level radioactive waste or uranium recovery facilities for disposal or recycling.”
Because the process is separating uranium and thorium fines from ore, it is considered a form of milling, not mining. And that’s an important distinction, because when you mill uranium ore, you leave behind mill tailings, which must be disposed of according to NRC and Environmental Protection Agency standards. Instead, the “coarse material,” as the waste is described, would be reintegrated into the mine site — even though it may contain radioactive and other harmful materials.
In its plan of operations for the October pile, Aura Grit said the process would require trucking in about 5,000 gallons of water per day (or 108,000 gallons per month) from a commercial well near Gateway.
If you’re looking to find these locations on a map, check out the Land Desk’s Mining Monitor Map, which is updated frequently.
Also, for an interactive map of all kinds of uranium prospects, mines, and mills,there’s Land Desk’s Uranium Mining in the Four Corners Country map derived from USGS data.
The BLM is looking to sell a 19 acre parcel on Las Vegas’s southern fringe to the city of Henderson for affordable housing.
🌵 Public Lands 🌲
Over the last year or so, there have been some bad faith attempts — most orchestrated by Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah — to take public lands out of the public hands and turn them over to developers. Amid all of the brouhaha over that, it can be easy to forget that a mechanism already exists for this sort of transfer, and it’s not always a terrible thing.
The Bureau of Land Management, for example, is looking to sell about 19 acres of land on the southern fringe of the Las Vegas metro area to the city of Henderson for affordable housing. The sale would occur under the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act, which Congress passed in 1998 to allow the feds to dispose of isolated, hard-to-manage tracts within the urban area, and to acquire private inholdings. The idea was to give Las Vegas more room to grow, while also protecting more remote, environmentally sensitive lands by transferring them into the public’s hands.
The process makes a lot of sense in southern Nevada, generally speaking, because there are so many disparate chunks of BLM land scattered throughout the city’s streetscape. While they do provide a sort of open space, they also can exacerbate “leapfrog” sprawl and essentially end up being vast vacant lots sandwiched between housing developments. And every city, including greater Las Vegas, is gripped by an affordable housing shortage.
That said, I’m curious about the choice of this particular parcel, more from an urban planning perspective than a public-land-transfer one. This is not one of those tracts surrounded by suburbia, but lies on the suburban fringe. It’s not in an existing neighborhood or even all that close to one and is beyond the reach of the bus line. It’s across the street from Combat Zone Paintball and a huge RV sales center and just up the road from Dig This Vegas, a “heavy equipment playground.”
It seems like it will not only encourage more physical sprawl, but will also amplify the disconnection and lack of community that sprawl fosters. Kids would have to walk at least two miles, across a pedestrian-unfriendly landscape, to get to the nearest school. Workers will have a long walk to the bus, or traffic-heavy driving commutes. And the only local neighborhood will be the housing complex, itself.
My take is that this sale should go forward and Henderson should build a multi-family, affordable complex here. But in the future I would hope that they’d focus on parcels that are actually within the city’s existing footprint. Because the last thing southern Nevada needs is more sprawl.
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🗺️ Messing with Maps 🧭
Last week I did the NASA Worldview satellite snowpack comparison, this time it’s Copernicus. The big difference is that you can zoom out more with Worldview, and zoom in for higher resolution looks with Copernicus. So here I went and found imagery from the San Juan Mountains in late February of this year, which is when snowpack levels peaked in the Animas River watershed, and another one from late March, following the big fat melt out.
Ice Lake Basin (just below center) and the South Mineral Creek drainage west of Silverton (which is just off the right side of the image) on Feb. 27, 2026. This was the peak of this winter’s snowpack in the Animas River watershed, about five weeks ahead of — and less than 50% of — the normal peak.
In this view, from March 29, 2026, south facing slopes are nearly completely melted out, and even Ice Lake Basin has lost most of its snow.
📸 Parting Shot 🎞️
And for another mind-blowing look at just how little snow there is, Land Desk reader and snow-guy Andy Gleason sent in some shots from Animas Forks, at 11,185 feet in elevation. That is some thin snow for late March. Heck, it’s thin snow for late May.
There is a little bit of good news, though. First off, take a close look at the satellite images above and the photos below. Notice that the snow is pretty white, and there’s not much visible dust. Usually the spring melt reveals layer after layer of dust on the snow’s surface, that then decreases the albedo — or reflectivity — and hastens the snow melt. There appears to be less dust this year, so far, meaning maybe what’s left of the snow won’t melt quite as fast.
Oh, and also: Even though the snowpack is ultra-thin, at least it’s not gone at these high altitudes, providing a base for the snow that this week’s forecasted storm should bring. There may still be some powder skiing to be had this season after all! (Scroll down for a weather forecast).
Animas Forks, Colorado, March 30, 2026. Andy Gleason photo.
Animas Forks, Colorado, March 30, 2026. Andy Gleason photo.
🚣🏽 Predict the Peak! 🌊
Don’t forget to submit your entry for the Predict the Peak spring runoff streamflow contest! The deadline for prize eligibility is April 3, so hurry up. Also, if you already submitted an entry, but you realized that your prediction might be thrown askew by this week’s snowy forecast? You have until April 3 to resubmit. Just keep in mind that only your most recent entry for each gauge will count.
The Pinto Valley Mine, processing area, and tailings depositories in the Globe-Miami mining district. Pinto Creek is to the viewer’s left. Source: Google Earth.
Pinto Creek used to run year-round. Bubbling up from springs and occasional snowmelt in the Pinal Mountains of central Arizona, it nourished a riparian ribbon of green through the rocky, arid landscape, shaded by sycamores, willows, and alders, until it empties into Theodore Roosevelt Reservoir. Gila topminnow, longfin dace, and roundtail chub plied its waters. Even during drought years it reliably delivered at least 1,000 acre-feet of water at its Magma Weir gauge, and in wet times as much as 39,000 acre-feet annually might flow along its bed.
Then, a little over a decade ago, something odd happened. The flow volume plummeted from 4,147 acre-feet in 2013 to just 482 acre-feet in 2014, and ever since the once year-round stream has run only intermittently and at similarly diminished levels. Towering trees along its banks have died and toppled, and the green swath has lost much of its color. It’s possible that long-term aridification simply caught up with the little stream, as 2013 was a dry year. But there’s a more likely culprit: In October 2013 Capstone Copper Corporation acquired the nearby Pinto Valley Mine, a massive, open pit copper and molybdenum operation that had just emerged from several years of dormancy, and resumed heavy groundwater pumping from its Peak Well field.
While correlation is not causation, the Tonto National Forest saw enough evidence of a link to ask the Arizona Department of Water Resources to put the brakes on the mine’s groundwater pumping. Failing to do so would harm the Forest Service’s instream Pinto Creek water right — along with the downstream riparian ecosystem it supports. The state did nothing and the Forest Service dropped the complaint and approved the mine’s expansion in 2021.
The Land Desk has often looked at mining’s effects on water quality.1 But the Pinto Valley case highlights the fact that mines can also affect water quantity — and vice versa, as water scarcity can limit mining operations. It warrants a closer look during these water-constrained times, when water consumption by everything from data centers to golf courses to alfalfa farms has attracted more scrutiny.
A mining operation goes through water in two ways. First, the mine itself, whether underground or open pit, can act like a well. Dig a hole into the earth, and groundwater will flow into it. While gravity can drain this flow in underground mines burrowed into the sides of mountains, the water must be pumped from open pit and underground shaft mines, a practice known as dewatering, which can take large amounts of water out of the aquifer. Capstone says it pumps about 400 gallons per minute from its pit.
This draws down groundwater wells and can dry up springs and diminish streamflows. Without dewatering, you end up with something like the Berkeley Pit, which is now a 50-billion-gallon, acidic and contaminated lake that’s about 900 feet deep. Because this water is usually contaminated by acid mine drainage, it often can’t be reused without some treatment, and dumping it into a stream or back into the aquifer is also problematic.
A mining operation also requires significant amounts of water for dust control, mineral processing, slurrying, and other uses. Capstone’s 2024 sustainability report says its Pinto Valley Mine withdrew a total of 8,932 acre-feet — or 2.9 billion gallons — of groundwater and surface water.
West Drought Monitor map March 24, 2026.
The company has not released its 2025 data yet, but in financial filings reported that the Pinto Valley Mine had to slash mine production and mill throughput by about 37% in 2025 due to “unplanned downtime driven by water constraints due to the drought conditions in central Arizona.” The company is trying to address this by reducing per-ton water usage by 20%, but that may not be enough given the extreme drought conditions spreading across the Southwest.
A central clearing house or database of mine water use in Arizona does not exist, but various sources can help paint a picture of how much water the mining industry in the state uses (I’ll look at other states in a future dispatch).
Safford Mine Complex: Consumptive water use increased from 3,624 acre-feet per year to 6,099 af/yr following a 2020 expansion, according to the Arizona Department of Water Resources 2025 Safford supply and demand report. Municipal uses in the Safford Basin use about 6,000 acre-feet per year, while agriculture — primarily for cotton, pecans, pistachios, and alfalfa — consumes about 138,301 acre-feet annually.
Freeport-McMoran reported to the AZDWR that in 2023 it withdrew 22,490 acre-feet of groundwater for its Sierrita Mine south of Tucson. The cost? $3.50 per acre-foot. That’s about one penny for 1,000 gallons of water.
Freeport-McMoran’s Morenci Mine, one of the nation’s largest copper operations, uses about 14,000 acre-feet per year on average, according to the AZDWR. The mine imports much of its water from the Black River, a tributary to the Salt River, under a lease with the San Carlos Apache Tribe for a portion of its Central Arizona Project allocation.
The following chart is from an Arizona Department of Mines & Mineral Resources report from 2010 by Dr. Madan M. Singh. It’s a nice, comprehensive look at how much water the state’s major mines used in the preceding years. Current use is likely about the same, except that now there are additional mines (the Pinto Valley Mine was not operational in 2010, which is why it’s missing).
Source: Water Consumption at Copper Mines in Arizona, by Dr. Madan M. Singh, 2010.
So, according to Singh’s report, Arizona’s largest mines used a total of 55,659 acre-feet per year during the 2000s. Add the Pinto Valley Mine (8,932 af) and Safford Mine (6,099 af) and you get about 70,600 acre-feet per year, or 23 billion gallons annually.
That’s a lot of water, but it pales in comparison to many other uses. Arizona alfalfa, alone, probably uses more than 1.5 million acre-feet (based on 6 af water/acre over 280,000 planted acres, according to the USDA). “Turf facilities” guzzled some 157,000 af in 2024, according to the AZDWR, while power generation used 86,053 acre-feet. TSMC’s north Phoenix chip manufacturing facility is projected initially to use about 19,000 acre-feet of water annually.
In other words, when Arizona’s water cops come looking for the big water users, the mines probably won’t be at the top of their list. Since most mines rely on groundwater, Colorado River water shortages may not affect them too much, at least in the near future.
Still, some mines, including ASARCO’s Mission Mine, do pull some water from the Central Arizona Project, which could be hit hard by the Colorado River crisis as early as next year. And, as the Pinto Valley Mine situation last year demonstrated, continued aridification and relentless pumping could lead to groundwater shortages at the mines, forcing them to reduce production even as they work to become more water-efficient.
Prospective mines could face serious challenges, as well. Resolution Copper estimates its contentious Oak Flat mine would use between 15,700 acre-feet and 20,000 acre-feet per year. Others, however, say this is too low; one study says it would likely be closer to 50,000 acre-feet annually, based on the per-ton water consumption for copper at other Arizona mines. Resolution has said it would rely at least partly on Central Arizona Project water, the security of which grows shakier with each passing year. It’s hard to imagine that there will be any water available for new users by the time that mine is up and running if current climatic trends continue.
That may be what Faraday Copper had in mind when it signed a letter of intent to acquire the San Manuel copper mine in southern Arizona. While Faraday said it would be reopening the long-shuttered operation and combining it with its proposed Copper Creek venture nearby, it may also be eying the substantial water rights BHP Copper holds for the San Manuel Mine. Those could come in handy if and when the Copper Creek facility is developed.
Regardless, however, one thing is clear: Any new mine is going to rob the springs, the streams, and the wildlife and communities that rely on them of at least some of their precious water. [ed. emphasis mine]
1 In 1993, when the Pinto Valley Mine was operated by Magma Copper, a large rain event “overwhelmed the mine’s water management capabilities,” causing the reservoir to overflow the tailings pile, tear out a levee, and carry hundreds of tons of tailings and millions of gallons of contaminated water into Pinto Creek. The creek was found to have low pH (high acidity) and high concentrations of cadmium, copper, lead, mercury, and zinc, resulting in significant fish die off, specifically of desert or Gila Mountain suckers.
Demand for copper is surging because of demand from new technologies, but suppliers are struggling to keep up, and they are likely to fall further behind in the coming years, resulting in shortfalls globally. Even though copper prices are at historically high levels, the financial risk involved in mining means that prices will need to go much higher before mining companies see profit in addressing the supply shortage.
Copper is abundant in the ground, but there’s not enough being extracted to be able to meet the demand. That’s because investors want higher and more reliable returns than copper mines currently offer, and the industry faces complex permitting processes and can’t find enough workers. Our analysis found that for new technologies to continue to develop, and for the global economy to continue to grow, even higher prices are ahead.
Recycling existing copper could help reduce the amount needed from new mines, but it would not be enough to meet the rising demand. Even under generous assumptions, we found that recycling might provide 35% of the global copper supply by 2050, with mining producing the remaining 65%.
The only other way to get more copper is to mine more of it. But building a new mine can take 20 to 30 years – a period during which investors are spending money but not yet getting returns, and a time when costs can rise significantly from preliminary estimates.
If industrial and economic growth is to stay on track in the 2030s, new mines would need to be in the financing and permitting processes right now. But they aren’t.
Even Resolution Copper, which started decades ago trying to develop a mine in Arizona outside Phoenix, has more work to do before being able to start mining. Since 1995, the project’s developers have spent several billion dollars on planning, permitting and legal cases.
Once in place, it could meet as much as 25% of U.S. copper demand from a high-concentration body of ore located near existing truck and rail lines.
Evaluating the environmental and community effects of proposed mining projects is essential, but in many countries there are overlapping levels of review that have different, and variable, timelines. And many parts of the process can be appealed to courts by opponents or supporters. That increases costs and imposes time delays for mine developers – and means consumers will have to wait longer, and pay more, for copper-intensive products and services.
Yet even though copper prices are near historic highs – over US$13,000 per ton on the London Metals Exchange – the profit margins are still too low and price swings are too volatile for companies to forecast reliable returns on the risky investment of building new mines.
Metal structures on the site of Resolution Copper’s proposed underground copper mine in Arizona, in a place that has been sacred to Native American people for thousands of years. Jim West/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
To get a picture of what might be possible if there were a significant global effort to increase copper availability, we evaluated several optimistic scenarios. We looked at faster permitting for new mines, higher recycling rates and smoother mining processes than those currently in place. But even then, economic development drove demand to grow far faster than the available supply.
Existing mines will have decreasing amounts of ore available and will produce less copper in 2050 than they do in 2025. Yet even if all known copper deposits with known mine-opening dates go into production as scheduled copper supplies will not keep up with demand.
Our best-case scenario has global mine production at about 30 million metric tons of copper a year by 2050. But to keep pace with global economic development, the world will need 37 million metric tons of mined copper a year by then.
To meet that additional need, more mines will need to be opened, and extra production developed – including extracting residual copper from old mine debris that was previously viewed as having too little copper to be worth processing.
Higher copper prices will ripple through the economy, raising costs for construction, energy and technology. But pretending those costs can be avoided doesn’t make them disappear. Underinvestment across the supply chain from mines to processing today shows up as bottlenecks tomorrow, including delayed grid upgrades and constrained digital growth.
Henry Muñoz, a former miner and resident of Superior, Arizona, overlooks a portion of Oak Flat—part of Tonto National Forest and a sacred site for the San Carlos Apache. Credit: Wyatt Myskow/Inside Climate News
Click the link to read the article on the AZCentral website (Debra Utacia Krol). Here’s an excerpt:
March 16, 2026
Key Points
A U.S. Court of Appeals denied a request to halt a land exchange at Oak Flat, clearing the way for mining work to begin.
Resolution Copper now owns the land, which is sacred to the Apache people, and plans to begin exploratory drilling.
Opponents, including the San Carlos Apache Tribe, have appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, citing religious freedom.
Resolution Copper told the U.S. Supreme Court it would begin exploratory drilling in the Oak Flat area on March 16 after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals turned down a bid from a coalition of environmentalists, the San Carlos Apache Tribe and a group of Apache women to halt a contentious land exchange. The three-judge panel issued its decision late Friday, March 13. Resolution relayed documents to the high court affirming the land exchange occurred shortly after the court rendered its decision. Resolution now owns Oak Flat, a location sacred to the Apaches and other Native people. The Forest Service issued the final record of decision March 16 finalizing the land exchange.
“The national security of America depends on our ability to harness the abundant natural resources we are blessed with in this country,” said Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins in a statement. “The Resolution Copper project is a prime example of bureaucratic and legal chokeholds preventing our rural communities, supply chains, and defense industry from producing the minerals we need right here in America.”
The appeals court denied an injunction in three cases, blocking a legal move that could have halted progress on the handover of the 2,200-acre site and another 211 acres currently within Tonto National Forest to Resolution, the British-Australian mining company, while the lawsuits continue to make their way through the court system. Miles Coleman, one of the attorneys representing the Brown-Lopez family and other Apache women, said the firm filed an appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court over the weekend.
“The transfer and destruction of Oak Flat would be a tragic departure from our nation’s founding promise of religious freedom,” Coleman told The Arizona Republic. He said the emergency application with the Supreme Court asked to preserve the status quo and protect Oak Flat.
The ruling came more than two months after the judges heard the three cases on Jan. 8. The judges turned the three down because they said the cases were “unlikely to succeed on the merits.”
The U.S. Forest Service late last week completed the transfer of 2,422 acres of emory oak-studded and boulder strewn public land in central Arizona to Resolution Copper, a subsidiary of global mining corporations BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto. The newly privatized land includes Chíchʼil Bił Dagoteel, or Oak Flat, a 760-acre parcel that President Dwight D. Eisenhower withdrew from mineral entry in 1955. The land transfer removes one of the biggest regulatory obstacles blocking the company’s bid to mine a massive copper deposit that lies about one mile below the surface of Oak Flat.
Some conservation groups initially withheld opposition to the land swap because of the ecological value of the land Resolution was giving up, some of which lies along the San Pedro River, an important corridor for migratory birds. In 2015 Congress passed a bill, with bipartisan support, allowing the swap to proceed. But the company and its politician enablers failed to recognize the significance of Oak Flat to the San Carlos Apache and other tribes in the region—and underestimated the fierceness of their resistance.
Over the ensuing decade, completion of the land exchange has been held up by legal challenges and widespread opposition from Indigenous and environmental groups. Apache Stronghold, a non-profit devoted to protecting sacred sites, took its case up the legal ladder, calling on federal courts to halt the land exchange on the grounds that privatizing and destroying Oak Flat with mining and resulting subsidence would violate the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Ultimately the Supreme Court refused to take up the case, and other legal challenges also were shot down by the courts.
The fight is not over, however. Shortly after the transfer was announced, a group of Apache women appealed to Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan to intervene and block the exchange. Even if that fails, Resolution will still need to obtain numerous permits before it can proceed. The land exchange removes most of the project from USFS jurisdiction, leaving it in the hands of state regulators.
Because of the depth of the deposit, the mine would be underground rather than open pit, and would use the cave panel method. This may make it less visible initially, but the magnitude of the endeavor will ultimately have significant impacts on a large swath of public and private lands. As material is removed from underground, the surface will sink, or subside, creating a huge crater and destroying Chíchʼil Bił Dagoteel. Dewatering the mine workings will affect the region’s hydrology, diminishing or drying up springs and “groundwater dependent ecosystems.” And the tailings pile is expected to cover thousands of acres in Dripping Springs Wash, basically filling a desert waterway with a mountain of acid-generating, metal-laden waste.
Mining, ore processing, and slurrying operations would require large amounts of additional water. The company plans to acquire at least some of that from the Central Arizona Project, which is currently facing potentially significant cutbacks due to Colorado River water shortages.
Map showing the locations of the mine and associated facilities, along with the tailings depository (the teal and gray blob on the right side, which will totally fill in the Dripping Springs Wash valley. Source: USFS EIS.
Here are some data from the Environmental Impact Statement for Alternative 6, which was chosen in the record of decision:
1.8 billion metric tons: Estimated size of the copper ore deposit under Oak Flat, one of the world’s largest.
The subsidence crater at Oak Flat will eventually be about 1.8 miles across and between 800 and 1,115 feet deep.
1.37 billion tons: Estimated volume of tailings produced over the life of the mine
20 miles: Length of slurry pipeline that would carry tailings from the ore processing facility to the Dripping Springs Wash tailings depository.
4,002 acres; 490 feet: Area and height of the proposed tailings depository.
9,900 to 17,000: acres of soil and vegetation expected to be disturbed. The analysis notes: “… impacts to soil health and productivity may last centuries to millennia … ”
377: Number of National Register of Historic Places-eligible sites directly affected by the project.
The project would result in the reduction of 13,781 acres of livestock grazing leases and 2,797 animal unit months over 9 allotments, and 14 grazing-related facilities (water sources) would be lost along with infrastructure at the Slash S headquarters.
87,000 acre-feet: Estimated volume of water that would be pumped from the mine (dewatering) over the project’s life. (Some hydrologists have questioned this estimate, saying it is too low).
Dewatering would affect 18 to 20 groundwater dependent ecosystems, i.e. springs.
540,000 acre-feet: Estimated amount of water that would be pumped from the Desert Wellfield in the East Salt River valley for mining and processing operations over the life of the project.
1,400; $149 million: Estimated number of full-time workers at the peak of the project and total annual employee compensation.
On a related note, I’m looking into water use at existing Arizona mines for a future Land Desk dispatch. Stay tuned. And in the meantime, if y’all have any good, reliable sources for this sort of information, I’d appreciate you sending it along to me.
🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫
Typically I wouldn’t depress you all with any snowpack/water news until early April, when mountain snowpacks typically peak, and when we should have a fairly clear picture of what we’re facing as far as spring runoff. But the Bureau of Reclamation released their projections for Lake Powell on Friday, and the heat wave that’s bearing down on the Southwest is threatening to melt whatever snow is still remaining. Without some cooler weather combined with big snows, a lot of areas may have already seen their peak snowpack, which would mean spring runoff is beginning now.
Yikes!
First, the Lake Powell projections. Notice that the probable minimum inflow (the red line) reaches 3,500 feet in July. Dam engineers really don’t want it going below that level (3,510 feet would be safer). And even the green line, or the most probable inflow, would drop to that point in September. Keep in mind that these projections are often over-estimates, meaning we could hit that critical level even earlier — especially given this friggin’ heat wave. And yet, the general public still has no idea how the Bureau of Reclamation might handle the situation.
One thing you can probably bet on: The Bureau will try to buoy Lake Powell’s levels by drawing down the Upper Basin reservoirs that are in the Colorado River Storage Project. That would be Flaming Gorge on the Green River, Navajo Reservoir on the San Juan, and the Wayne Aspinall Unit (Blue Mesa, Crystal, and Morrow Point) on the Gunnison. This will, of course, affect recreation on those reservoirs as well as downstream irrigators.
And on to the heat wave. Here are some forecasts for the next few days.
The earliest 100°F day on record in Phoenix was on March 26. That record will fall this week, along with many others, I’m sure. I mean, extreme heat warnings in March? Come on!
Then there’s the far-less blistering, but equally concerning temperatures in the mountains. Silverton, at 9,318 feet in elevation and near the headwaters of both Colorado River and Rio Grande tributaries, is looking to have a full-on March thaw — even at night. Look at those lows for Wednesday through Friday: All above freezing. No bueno.
Oak Flat, Arizona features groves of Emory oak trees, canyons, and springs. This is sacred land for the San Carlos Apache tribe. Resolution Copper (Rio Tinto subsidiary) lobbied politicians to deliver this National Forest land to the company with the intent to build a destructive copper mine. By SinaguaWiki – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=98967960
The Navajo Mine, which supplies coal to the Four Corners Generating Station; aerial view looking west. Wikimedia Commons: User Dicklyon licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
Residents of the Navajo community of Burnham, New Mexico, have raised concerns about the expansion of a coal mine, including its environmental impact and a lack of transparency .
The Navajo Transitional Energy Company has proposed expanding the Navajo Mine, potentially extending its life by 110 years.
Opponents question the need for a 110-year expansion, as the mine’s only customer is a power plant set to close in 2031.
Dailan Long, with his relatives and other members of the Navajo community in Burnham, New Mexico, has long worked to defend their community from coal industry efforts to expand access to the area—an ongoing struggle that has led him to ask, “Are we always going to keep fighting?” The latest threat is a proposed expansion of the Navajo Mine by the Navajo Transitional Energy Company, a plan that could keep the operation running for 110 years, even though the only coal-fired power plant in the area is set to close in 2031. Long, his relative Joni Lapahie, and other community members are working to raise awareness about the proposal, which they say surfaced only recently despite assurances from their chapter administration. NTEC has submitted an application for the “No Name Permit,” after the No Name arroyo runs through the permit area. It would expand coal mining operations across about 11,526 acres. NTEC proposes to mine 9,042 acres of the area, with a maximum annual production rate of 5 million tons of coal per year, starting in 2031. The total mined coal would be approximately 503 million tons, extending the mine’s life to 2136. In late January, the Office of Surface Mining held a scoping meeting at the Burnham Chapter House, where members of the community, environmental justice groups and employees voiced their concerns or support for the expansion. The office said during the meeting that it intends to prepare a draft environmental impact statement by August less than a year after NTEC submitted its permit application package application. Many critics of the expansion say that’s too quick of a turn around.
While the Four Corners Country uranium mining “renaissance” advances in starts and fits and hyped up press releases, copper and critical mineral extraction in southern Arizona moves forward in more substantial ways.
Last week, the U.S. Forest Service published the final environmental impact statement for South32’s proposal to re-open and expand the Hermosa Mine in southern Arizona to extract battery materials such as manganese and zinc, along with silver and lead. This opened the 45-day objection period.
The mine is on patented claims (private land), but would be expanded onto unpatented claims (public land) in the Coronado National Forest in southern Arizona’s Patagonia Mountains, an area long inhabited by the Sobaipuri O’odham and Hohokam people. The mountains occupy the nexus of several different biological provinces and are home to hundreds of species of birds, bees, bats, and butterflies, as well as the unique Madrean Pine-Oak Woodlands.
The proposed action, an underground mine, would play out on about 442 surface acres and would restrict access to about 578 acres of public lands. Mining would be done by the long-hole open stope method.
Area residents and advocates worry this sort of industrialization will harm the delicate and unique ecosystem and the diverse array of wildlife that depends on it. As is often the case with underground hardrock mining, a primary concern is for its effects on water quality and quantity.
Under South32’s proposed action, it would pump about 2,790 acre-feet of groundwater per year to dewater the mine, which would draw down the aquifer and water levels of area wells. Some of this water would be used for other mining purposes, some would be discharged into area streams, and some would be discharged into rapid infill basins in order to slow the aquifer’s drawdown.
Acid mine drainage is expected to occur in the sulfide ore body, which, if not treated properly, could contaminate groundwater or streams in the arid region.
Canada-based Faraday Copper has signed a letter of intent to acquire the shuttered San Manuel copper mine in southern Arizona from BHP Group Limited. The San Manuel mine, just outside Mammoth, Arizona, was once the nation’s largest underground copper mine and a significant producer up to its closure in 1999.
Faraday hopes to reopen the mine and associated infrastructure and pair it up with its proposed Copper Creek venture nearby.
The proposed Copper Creek mine covers about 78 square kilometers in the Galiuro Mountains about 9 miles east of Mammoth. Last June, the Bureau of Land Management approved Faraday’s plan to construct 67 drill pads, along with associated roads and infrastructure.
The development has sparked pushback from residents, advocates, and tribal nations, who worry about the drilling’s potential impacts to water quantity and quality in the Lower San Pedro River, which flows nearby, not to mention the prospect of a giant open pit mine in the biodiverse mountain range. The proposed mine site is also near the Aravaipa Wilderness Area, a stunning canyon and desert riparian zone.
***
Mining company press releases tend to be vapid pronouncements about purportedly successful prospecting efforts. But every once in a while, they say something interesting. Such was the case with a bulletin sent out with this header:
American Atomics Bets $18 Million on Utah Uranium: Will It Break Free from Colorado’s Regulatory Grip and Capitalize on the Nuclear Surge?
What the heck is this about? American Atomics, née Great Northern Energy Metals, is looking to acquire an 80% interest in 217 mining claims in the Lisbon Valley in Utah. In the process, they are apparently abandoning a project near Slick Rock, in San Miguel County, Colorado, because the county recently implemented new mining regulations.
I knew that San Miguel County was working on mining regulations — which were adopted this January — but I’m honestly a bit surprised that they chased this company away from a viable project. Which could indicate that the project wasn’t actually all that viable in the first place.
American Atomics would acquire the Lisbon Valley claims from Big Indian Prospecting LLC, which is run by none other than Mark Steen, the son of Moab’s uranium king Charles Steen.
My first impulse upon seeing the faded and tattered windsocks as I motored along a southeastern Utah backroad in early November was to look for the landing strip. There was none. Then I saw the distinctive infrastructure of an oil and gas well surrounded by WARNING POISON GAS KEEP OUT s…
🐟 Colorado River Chronicles 💧
The incredible shrinking Lake Powell is having a tough time of it lately. First, it’s growing smaller and smaller, thanks to acidification and folks pulling more water out of the Colorado River than it carries, which is causing some boat launch ramps to be unusable. As the reservoir subsides, it leaves big sand and mudflats behind, which leads to nasty quicksand that can suck in unsuspecting beachgoers. The National Park Service is warning visitors about those two hazards, and now there’s a new one: harmful algal blooms containing cyanotoxins have been detected at dangerously high concentrations in parts of the reservoir. The NPS recommends avoiding water that has algal blooms.
☘️ Annals of Alfalfa 🍀
For those of you interested in the alfalfa, irrigation, and Colorado River issues, I recommend going back and checking out the comment thread on Tuesday’s “Alfalfa Fallacy” dispatch. At last count there were 26 comments, all of which add context and insight to this tangled issue.
Anyone can read the comments, but only paid subscribers can contribute to the comment section and become part of this smart community. So sign up now!
There’s a lot of press on Sen. Mike Lee’s and Rep. Celeste Maloy’s attempts to use the Congressional Review Act to axe Grand Staircase Escalante’s management plan. There’s a good reason for all of the attention: It’s another bid by the senator to diminish public lands protections, which seems to be his primary mission and the consequences could be far-reaching.
That said, it seems that a lot of the coverage is slightly overblown, and maybe gives the wrong idea of what, exactly, this might mean for the national monument if it is successful. So I’m going to try to offer some clarity here. I’m not doing this to criticize these media outlets — which I do respect — but hopefully to explain what a national monument designation does and the role its management plan plays.
Inside Climate News headlined their story on the move like this:
“A Little-Used Maneuver Could Mean More Drilling and Mining in Southern Utah’s Redrock Country“
“The monument would still exist on paper. But the framework governing what happens on 1.87 million acres of southern Utah canyon country would be gone. Camping, grazing, road access, mineral extraction, cultural site protections. All of it. And BLM would be legally prohibited from replacing it with anything substantially similar.
“A monument without a management plan is a legal shell. A name on a map with no rules governing what happens on the ground.“
Okay, this move could mean a lot of things somewhere down the road, including perhaps more mining and drilling somewhere, and it would set a scary precedent. But eliminating the management plan for the national monument will not by itself lead to more drilling and mining within the national monument. That’s because even without a management plan, a national monument does have meaning and certain restrictions that are inherent in its national monument-ness. It is not, as MTJPs puts it, merely a “legal shell.”
When a president designates a national monument under the authority of the Antiquities Act, they typically withdraw all federal land within the boundaries from new mining claims and energy leases. When re-establishing GSENM after it had been shrunken by Trump, President Biden proclaimed that the land would be withdrawn “from all forms of entry, location, selection, sale, or other disposition under the public land laws, from location, entry, and patent under the mining laws, and from disposition under all laws relating to mineral and geothermal leasing.”
Existing, valid leases and claims are grandfathered in, but in the case of GSENM, the feds bought out the only existing lease — for a coal mine on the Kaiparowitz Plateau — shortly after the original designation in 1996.The proclamation designating the national monument also contains other, overarching guidelines. For example, when Biden restored GSENM and Bears Ears in 2021, he added this to the proclamations:
“The Secretary shall … ensure the protection of sacred sites and cultural properties and sites in the monument and provide access to Tribal members for traditional cultural, spiritual, and customary uses … including collection of medicines, berries and other vegetation, forest products … .”
And he added this:
“Should grazing permits or leases be voluntarily relinquished by existing holders, the Secretary shall retire from livestock grazing the lands covered by such permits or leases … Forage shall not be reallocated for livestock grazing purposes.”
These things are baked into the national monument from the beginning, and stand apart from any management plan. They can’t be altered without revoking the proclamation or replacing it with another one.
The management plan then zooms in and develops a more detailed regulatory framework, such as which areas of the monument might be off limits to grazing, or if and where recreational target shooting is allowed, or which roads are designated for motorized use. While they are usually more restrictive than the pre-monument resource management plans, this isn’t always the case. And they typically don’t address oil and gas drilling or mining because those uses are prohibited by the national monument’s proclamation.
Lee and Maloy are looking to revoke the management plan, not the national monument itself (although I’m sure they’d like that, too). If they succeed, they will not clear the way for drilling or mining within the monument’s boundaries. Nor will it create some kind of anarchic free-for-all in the canyons of southern Utah.
Most likely the monument would revert back to the previous management plan, which was developed under Trump I for a significantly diminished national monument. This is problematic because that plan was more lax, sought to reinstate suspended grazing leases, and allowed extractive uses in the removed parts of the monument. If nothing else, it will cause confusion and leave some parts of the national monument in regulatory limbo.
However, all of the land will still be overseen by the BLM, and would still be subject to federal environmental and historic preservation laws. Camping, grazing, and road access rules and cultural site protections wouldn’t just vanish. And, of course, new mining claims and energy leases would continue to be banned within the monument, because those withdrawals supersede the management plan.
That said, the prospect of eliminating this management plan is alarming. The agencies spent years developing it in consultation with tribal nations, they incorporated oodles of public comments and concerns, and ended up with a solid, compromise blueprint for overseeing a vast and varied and spectacular landscape. Lee would just be tossing all of that effort and all of the resources that went into making it into the trash, while sowing confusion for both the national monument managers and its many visitors. And all for what?
I’m guessing Lee’s just trying to score points with his base. But also, it seems that his long-term agenda is to force public land management into a state of utter dysfunction in hopes of gaining support for his mission to turn over public lands to private hands.
On a related note, one reader asked how the Congressional Review Act could be applied to a management plan that was finalized over a year ago. After all, the CRA is intended to be used on new rules, and has a set time limit. Great question! For an answer, I consulted an explainer by Sarah Hart-Curran of the Harvard Law School’s Environmental & Energy Law Program.
Hart-Curran writes: “For 60 legislative days after Congress receives a rule, Congress can use ‘fast track’ procedures to issue a joint resolution of disapproval, meaning Congress needs only a simple majority in the Senate to veto the rule.”
Obviously, it has been more than 60 days since the plan was finalized. So what gives? Well, like all such plans, this one was not submitted to Congress, simply because these plans have not been considered “rules” in the past. So really, they shouldn’t be subject to the CRA at all, time limit or no. Hart-Curran explains:
“If an agency does not submit a rule that Congress thinks should be subject to CRA review, congressional practice is to request an opinion from the GAO. If the GAO finds the action is subject to the CRA, the GAO opinion serves as submission of a rule, beginning the 60-legislative-day clock.”
Yeah, so Lee and Maloy submitted this to the GAO, the GAO said it was a rule, and so the 60-day clock is now ticking.
📸 Parting Shot 🎞️
The now defunct Hatch Trading Post back when it was still running. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
The Bureau of Land Management’s Mineral & Land Records System seems like a strange place to get trolled. But I think it just happened. I was looking through the MLRS to try to get an idea of whether insanely high gold and silver prices, and relatively strong uranium prices, had inspired companies or speculators to stake new mining claims n southwestern Colorado and southeastern Utah, when I came across something that seemed almost satirical.
Late last year, Kimmerle Mining Company staked four 20.66-acre lode claims in Garfield County, Utah, on the east slope of the Henry Mountains (just east of Mt. Pennell). The claim’s names? Trump I, Trump 2, Trump 3, and Trump 4.
The Kimmerle family, of Moab, control hundreds of mining claims across southeastern Utah. But they generally don’t mine them, except, it seems, to make a point.
The Kimmerles are the ones who staked mining claims on a mesa just east of Hideout Canyon inside Bears Ears National Monument just months just before the Obama administration withdrew the area from new mining claims. After Trump shrunk the monument to exclude the White Canyon area in 2017, and just before Biden restored the boundaries in 2021, Kimmerle Mining staked five new claims in the area and acquired additional claims from another mining company. Kimmerle Mining promptly filed for a permit to do exploration work there, but the BLM said they had to demonstrate the claims “validity,” or show that they contained “valuable minerals.” The process for doing so would cost up to $100,000.
Shortly thereafter, Kimmerle joined the state of Utah’s lawsuit seeking to eviscerate the national monument, claiming that its establishment had caused him to lose out on mining profits.
No word on whether the firm plans on drilling or mining its Trump claims, but at least we know these folks’ political leaning.
There have been a handful of other notable mining claim locations in the area in the past six months, including:
Platoro West Inc., located in Durango, staked twelve 20.66-acre lode claims southeast of Ouray, Colorado, in the Bear Creek drainage near Darley and Engineer Mountains. The company is registered under the name of William Sheriff, who was recently named executive chairman of Verdera Energy, which has interests in in-situ uranium mining in New Mexico.
CCKC Inc., of Philadelphia, located three 20-acre placer claims in Dolores County along the Dolores River upstream of Rico.
Roughead Resources of Moab (but which has also been associated with a Houston address) staked fifteen 20.66-acre lode claims in the Lisbon Valley of southeastern Utah near the Mi Vida Mine and the Lisbon Valley Copper Mine. At the same time, the company also staked dozens of claims in Beaver County, Utah.
Fermi Metals of Cocolalla, Idaho, staked twenty-three 20.66-acre claims on the southern slope of the La Sal Mountains, just north of the settlement of La Sal. This is near Energy Fuels’ La Sal Complex uranium mines.
Geobrines International, of Littleton, Colorado, staked twenty-five 20-acre placer claims in Grand County, Utah, along I-70 between Green River and Cisco. This adds to a cluster of previously filed claims in the same area. They are probably looking to do lithium extraction.
Utah Brine Corporation, of Omaha, Nebraska, staked seventy 20-acre claims southwest of the community of La Sal in the Lisbon Valley. UBC appears to be a subsidiary of Omaha Value Inc., which has partnered with an Australian critical materials firm Neometals on its Utah Brine Project, which aims to extract lithium and potash.
Antimony Canyon Sovereign Reserve Inc, a division of Australia firm American Tungsten & Antimony, staked nineteen 20.66-acre lode claims near Antimony, Utah, in Garfield County. The plan is to develop an antimony mine here.
In other mining news:
Metallic Minerals has been eyeing and drilling into a copper deposit in the La Plata Mountains of southwestern Colorado. While actual mining may be a long ways off, concerned locals are already coming together to keep an eye on the project and push back, if necessary. The La Plata Mountains and Public Lands Coalition now has about 225 members from the region, according to Dan King, the coalition’s administrator. Metallic Minerals’ proposal was just one of the catalysts for the coalition, and its mission is much broader and more regional in scope.
Gold and silver prices have shot up tremendously over the last year, probably due to the Trump-effect on the economy and the U.S. dollar, which is stuck at a ridiculously low exchange rate. Gold is now around $5,000/oz, while silver is hovering around $100/oz., compared to just $30 when Trump took office. Uranium’s doing well, too, sitting consistently in the $80/lb to $90/lb range.
Which is to say, mining companies suddenly have a lot more incentive to invest in reopening existing, idle mines or even building new ones (assuming they have faith that the high prices will endure). So far, however, it doesn’t seem to have sparked a surge in new mining activity. Even the Revenue-Virginius silver mine near Ouray, which is purportedly ready to produce ore, remains idle.
The uranium sector does appear to be emerging from its long slumber, but mostly in the form of exploratory drilling, smaller companies selling claims to bigger ones, and staking mining claims on the increasingly sparse sections of public land that aren’t already claimed. Anfield continues work on constructing its Velvet-Wood mine in the Lisbon Valley, but it’s still a ways away from production (and its Shootaring mill is still mothballed and unlicensed).
Energy Fuels is about the only firm actually producing conventional ore. According to their SEC filings, they pulled about 1.5 million pounds of uranium from the Pinyon Plain mine near the Grand Canyon and 155,000 pounds from their La Sal Complex in 2025. Their White Mesa Mill recovered 1 million pounds of uranium, which is a heck of a lot more than in the past, but still is far short of the facility’s 8-million-pound annual capacity. Despite all of this, the company still lost $86 million in 2025.
Meanwhile, the silver and gold mining corporations raked in massive profits, including:
Canadian corporation Barrick, which owns major gold mines in Nevada (Fourmile and Nevada Gold Mines) reported an attributable EBITDA of $8.16 billion last year, the “highest shareholder returns” in the company’s history.
Newmont (which jointly owns Nevada Gold Mines with Barrick) reported an adjusted EBITDA of $13.5 billion.
Kinross, owner of Bald Mountain and Round Mountain in Nevada, Fort Knox and Manh Choh in Alaska, and Kettle River-Curew Project in Washington, reported adjusted net earnings of $2.2 billion
Rio Tinto’s “profit after tax attributable to owners of Rio Tinto (net earnings)” $10 billion.
SSR Mining, which owns a big mine in Nevada, only had a net income of $362 million; but that compares to 2024’s loss of $350 million.
Speaking of commodity prices and profits: American oil and gas companies are poised to make out like bandits thanks to the Trump-Netanyahu war on Iran.
Iran produces some oil and gas. But more importantly, it borders the Strait of Hormuz and has threatened any oil and gas tankers that try to pass through it, effectively closing the passage. That could stanch the flow of oil and gas to the global market, causing prices to rise. The West Texas Intermediate, or WTI, crude oil price has shot up to about $76, the highest it’s been since before Trump took office. This will cause gasoline prices to climb, but also make drilling in the U.S. more profitable, and could spur companies to start using the stockpile of public land drilling permits they’ve amassed over the last year or so.
Liquefied natural gas tankers also are unable to get through the Strait to European markets, which will cause prices of the fuel to skyrocket. It could also force European countries to turn to U.S. LNG exporters, which could echo back to natural gas producing states like New Mexico and Wyoming (and also may increase U.S. natural gas prices if the conflict drags on).
Glen Canyon Dam Must Be Modified to Avoid Draconian Water Supply Disruptions
A guest post by Ron Rudolph
Glen Canyon Dam with the river outlets in use as part of the high-flow experimental release. The outlets are only used occasionally and are not engineered for sustained use. Usually, all of the releases go through the penstocks and the hydroelectric turbines. But that won’t be possible if the lake drops below the level known as minimum power pool. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Glen Canyon Dam, which impounds the Colorado River to form Lake Powell, is a single point of failure that poses an unacceptable risk to the functioning of the entire river system. Modifying the dam to allow more water to pass through or around it is an essential component of any plan for allocating the river’s dwindling supply.
The dam’s structural flaw limits the amount of water that can pass from Lake Powell downstream to Lake Mead. Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir, is the primary repository of water for the Colorado River’s so-called Lower Basin states: California, Arizona, and Nevada. A paucity of water released from Lake Powell would eventually force reductions in the amount of water extracted from Lake Mead, diminish drinking water supplies for millions, harm agricultural productivity throughout the southwest, and embroil the federal government, seven states, more than two dozen Tribal Nations, Mexico, and others that share the river’s water in a cascade of costly court cases.
The back of Glen Canyon Dam circa 1964, not long after the reservoir had begun filling up. Here the water level is above dead pool, meaning water can be released via the river outlets, but it is below minimum power pool, so water cannot yet enter the penstocks to generate electricity. Bureau of Reclamation photo. Annotations: Jonathan P. Thompson
Due to Glen Canyon Dam’s physical limitations, when the elevation of Lake Powell reaches “minimum power pool” or lower, the only way to release water from the dam is through its river outlet works.1 The persistent drought in the southwest, and continued demand for the river’s reduced water supply, makes it highly likely Lake Powell will fall to minimum power pool this year. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation estimated this month that Lake Powell could fall to minimum power pool by late July, and remain there or lower through 2027.2
The Bureau of Reclamation’s latest forecast for the Colorado River predicts Lake Powell will “most probably” drop below the critical minimum power pool level before the end of this year, jeopardizing Glen Canyon Dam’s structural integrity. In the worst-case scenario, it would do so before summer’s end. This could force the feds to operate the dam as a “run-of-the-river” operation to preserve the dam’s infrastructure and hydropower output, which would significantly diminish downstream flows and threaten Lower Basin water supplies.
In addition, the agency’s February forecast estimates that under “most probable inflow” conditions, Lake Mead would drop below elevation 1,040 in June. If conditions do not improve by the agency’s August forecast, mandatory reductions in water use would be required in Arizona, California, Nevada, and Mexico.3 If the annual amount of water let out from Lake Powell is restricted to the dam’s outlet works, it would result in less water reaching Lake Mead than any year this century, and could trigger even larger reductions in Lower Basin water consumption.4 Releasing water from reservoirs upstream from Lake Powell could forestall the reservoir reaching minimum power pool, however, that is a non-sustainable solution, that fails to address Glen Canyon Dam’s fundamental plumbing problem.
In January, the Bureau of Reclamation’s draft environmental impact statement — Post-2026 Operational Guidelines and Strategies for Lake Powell and Lake Mead —proposed several options for managing the Colorado River for the next 20 years. None of the alternatives includes remedying Glen Canyon Dam’s structural flaws.
The Bureau’s proposals have been criticized by some of the largest consumers of Colorado River water who have signaled a willingness to challenge the agency in court. For example, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which serves nearly 19 million people, noted the Bureau’s proposed alternatives “would likely lead to lengthy litigation.”5 The Central Arizona Project, the second largest consumer of Colorado River water, has identified several “legal deficiencies,” including non-compliance with the Colorado River Compact, and failure to adequately disclose and analyze the environmental, economic and socioeconomic impacts.6
Depending exclusively on the river outlet works to release sufficient water through Glen Canyon Dam is bound to fail, like relying on rainfall to grow crops in Arizona or southern California. The Bureau has warned relying on the outlet works would risk water supply disruptions to those who depend on Lake Powell and Lake Mead.7 The Director of the Bureau’s Technical Service Center has advised against using the outlet works as the sole means for releasing water from the dam,8 as previous high-capacity use of them for only 72 hours caused structural damage, which required nine months to repair. Despite the remedial effort, the Bureau concluded the repairs will not prevent future damage.9 The dam’s design flaw led the Arizona Department of Water Resources to conclude the structural limitations of Glen Canyon Dam must be alleviated.10
The calculus for equitably apportioning the diminishing water in the Colorado River is extremely complicated. But one variable in the equation is as obvious as the bathtub ring surrounding Lake Powell: a new system for conveying water sustainably through or around Glen Canyon Dam must be built. Without it, risks to the Colorado River system, and the communities, agriculture and ecosystems reliant on it, will escalate, as will pressure to impose compulsory reductions in consumptive uses throughout the basin.
Ron Rudolph, a former assistant executive director of Friends of the Earth, spent 35 years in various engineering companies, including MWH Global, CH2M Hill, Jacobs Engineering, and Cardno with a career focused on infrastructure development and environmental remediation.
1 U.S.Bureau of Reclamation, Technical Decision Memorandum, Establishment of Interim Operating Guidance for Glen Canyon Dam During Low Reservoir Levels at Lake Powell, March 26, 2024, page 9
3 When Lake Mead drops below elevation 1,040, a “Level 2 Shortage Condition,” mandatory reductions in water use by Arizona, California, Nevada, and Mexico are required by the 2007 Interim Guidelines for managing Lake Powell and Lake Mead, and the 2019 Lower Basin Drought Contingency Plan
4 The Bureau’s guidance for maximum release of water from each river outlet work (ROW) at minimum power pool elevation is 3,185 cubic feet/second (cfs). The agency has determined only three ROWs would be available simultaneously. If three ROWs operate at full capacity, they would release 9,555 cfs. 1 cfs sustained for a year = 724.acre-feet/year. 9,555 x 724.45 = 6,922,000 acre-feet/year. The maximum releases are specified in USBR, Technical Decision Memorandum, Establishment of Interim Operating Guidance for Glen Canyon Dam During Low Reservoir Levels at Lake Powell, March 26, 2024, page 2. The determination that only three ROWs would be available simultaneously in based on USBR, Near-term Colorado River Operations, Final Supplemental Impact Statement, March 2024, page 2-3. The least amount of water released this century was 7 million acre-feet in 2022, based on data from U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, Colorado River Accounting and Water Use Report: Arizona, California and Nevada, 2000-2024
5 Statement of Metropolitan Water District’s General Manager, Shivaji Deshmukh, January 9, 2026
6 Patrick Dent, Assistant General Manager, Water Policy, Central Arizona Project, Report on Post-2026 Draft Environmental Impact Statement, February 5, 2026
7 U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, Near-term Colorado River Operations, Final Supplemental Impact Statement, March 2024, page 1-9, footnote 10
8 USBR, Technical Decision Memorandum, Establishment of Interim Operating Guidance for Glen Canyon Dam During Low Reservoir Levels at Lake Powell, March 26, 2024, page 9
Sen. Mike Lee, the MAGAt from Utah, appears to be vying to be the most anti-public land politician in history. The Trump sycophant was, of course, behind last year’s congressional bids to sell off public land to real estate developers and various other schemes. His latest assault is the Historic Roadways Protection Act, which passed through a Senate committee yesterday. It would block the Bureau of Land Management from “closing historical roads” and implementing travel management plans across a broad swath of federal lands in Utah until a federal court rules on thousands of county RS-2477 claims.
RS-2477 is an 1866 statute that allowed highways to be constructed across federal lands to access mining claims and homesteads. It was repealed in 1976 when Congress passed the Federal Land Policy Management Act, or FLPMA. But FLPMA grandfathered in existing “highways” that had been constructed under RS-2477. In 2010 and 2011, Utah and its counties filed some 12,000 RS-2477 claims on about 35,000 miles of “highways” on federal lands, many of which are no more than old livestock tracks, in hope of gaining control of the paths so they can grade them, widen them, and even pave them. Settling all of these claims could take decades, meaning Lee’s bill would essentially be banning the BLM from managing travel on these areas forever.
Albert Bacon Fall, the New Mexico Senator and disgraced Interior Secretary under President Warren G. Harding still has my vote for the most anti-public land politician. But maybe that’s because Fall was actually a colorful character. Lee’s most interesting trait is that he holds Jell-O socials in his Capitol office.
One of the things I like about Page, Arizona, are the weird and ubiquitous contrasts that characterize the place. There’s the surreality of a lakeside city in the desert and the striking juxtaposition of golf course greens against stone. But perhaps the most jarring of all is the sensation of wandering Safeway’s aisles in a distinctly American town and hearing fellow patrons speaking languages from all over the world.
The Southwest attracts visitors from across the globe and, as a result, the increasingly dominant tourism and outdoor recreation industries have come to depend on international travelers. After Trump was inaugurated and implemented his America First creed, which tends to manifest as hostility towards every other nation, international travel to the U.S. dropped. That’s in spite of the fact that Trump’s economic policies have also caused the dollar’s value to plummet, making the U.S. a cheap vacation spot for Europeans.
Over the summer of 2025, that appears to have led to a drop in visitation to most national parks in the Southwest. However, visitation tended to rebound in the fall — perhaps due to lower gas prices — bringing the annual numbers back up to close to what they were in 2024.
One exception was Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, which saw a huge drop in visitors last year, probably due to a combination of low reservoir levels at Lake Powell, a massive wildfire on the Grand Canyon’s North Rim, and the drop in international visitation. But if tax revenues are any indication, it hasn’t hurt the overall tourism industry in Page that badly. Sales tax, hotel/motel tax, and online lodging tax revenues for January through September 2025 were up significantly from the previous year, according to the City of Page’s statistics.
Grand Canyon NP and Glen Canyon National Recreation Area saw the biggest drops in year-over-year visitation in 2025, which may be due to a fire on the Grand Canyon’s North Rim and the drop in international travel to the U.S. Visitation continues to grow at Yellowstone, Grand Teton, and Olympic National Parks. Source: NPS.
Arches National Park saw a marked decrease in visitation following the implementation of a timed entry system in 2022, but since then it has held steady and increased between 2024 and 2025. Most other Southwest national park units saw a decrease in visitation last year, however.
🏠 Random Real Estate Room 🤑
The most expensive home on the market in Jackson Hole currently. Source: Zillow.
You’ll all be thrilled, I’m sure, to learn that the uber-wealthy had a pretty good year in 2025, at least if high-end home and land sales are any indication. Luxury real estate sales in Jackson, Wyoming, reportedly are “surging” and “closed the year with exceptional momentum.” That’s the latest from The Viehman Group’s Jackson Hole Report, something I read when I want that lovely sensation of barfing in the back of my mouth.
Thirty-seven homes sold for over $10 million in the region last year, with 25 of them netting a sale price of over $15 million. The most expensive home sale was the Bar B Bar Ranch 4, with “multiple enhanced spring creeks for fishing,” which went for a modest $43 million.
But don’t worry! Overpriced luxury homes remain for the taking! For instance, you can buy a glorified quonset hut — er, an 8,583-square-foot steel, glass, and stone mansion — for $60 million. I know that seems like a lot, but according to Zillow’s BuyAbility calculator, the monthly payments would be a mere $320,673 after a $12 million down payment.
The median earnings for full-time year-round workers in Teton County are about $70,000 per year, which, according to Zillow’s mortgage calculator, could allow one to afford a $220,000 home with a $10,000 down payment. Meanwhile, the median home sale price in Teton County is about $3.8 million. And the cheapest home on the market is a 1970s, 644 sf condo listed for $695,000 (after a $30k reduction).
So, yeah, the West’s housing affordability crisis is as bad as ever, and the gap between the uber-rich and everyone else continues to grow.
🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫
The Abundance movement has reached the Colorado River, brought by an unexpected flag-bearer. The motorized recreation organization, BlueRibbon Coalition, is proposing the Colorado River Abundance Act. The vision, writes the coalition, is simple: “The American Southwest does not have to settle for managing a dwindling resource. It can choose abundance and start building.”
Building what? You ask. The answer: “A coordinated suite of desalination plants — offshore, onshore, and binational — supported by pipelines, pumping systems, brine-management facilities, and sediment removal programs.” These plants would crank out as much as 7 million acre-feet of water per year and deliver it to the river and/or directly to Lower Basin water users. That would allow more water to stay in Lake Powell and Lake Mead, thereby buoying reservoir levels.
And that would, among other things, improve boating and other recreation on those reservoirs, which is why the BlueRibbon Coalition is pushing the concept. In addition to creating funds for building a massive amount of water desalination and transportation infrastructure, the proposed legislation would also “elevate recreation to a coequal project purpose, establishing Recreation Modernization Plans for key reservoirs,” and pushing major upgrades to marinas, launch ramps, docks, trails, and shoreline facilities, “including a top-priority requirement to rebuild mid-lake services at Lake Powell with fast-track approval.”
That’s referring to the late Dangling Rope Marina, a remote floating boat refueling and restocking station in Dangling Rope Canyon, located about halfway between the down-lake marinas and Halls Crossing in the upper section of the reservoir. But low water levels and a damaged electrical system forced the National Park Service to shutter it in 2021, and it has not been reopened or replaced.
This abundance approach could work, in theory. But consider this: the largest desalination plant in the world, Ras Al Khair in Saudi Arabia, can treat about 306,500 acre-feet of water per year. It reportedly cost about $7 billion to construct, and uses about 3,626 megawatt-hours of electricity each day — that adds up to 1,323 gigawatt-hours annually, or enough to power tens of thousands of homes (or a handful of data centers). You’d need about 20 of those leviathans and a crapload of generation capacity to reach the 7 MAF/yr target of this plan, not to mention the extensive pumping and piping infrastructure to get the water to where it needs to go.
At some point, doesn’t it seem just a little bit easier, and a hell of a lot less expensive, to live within our means?
I will say that the Abundance approach is a step up from a, let’s say Archimedean, proposal to raise Lake Powell’s level by, wait for it, throwing a bunch of car batteries into the reservoir. If you’re wondering if this was a serious idea or not, just consider from where it came: The Sonoran Avalanche Center.
Sonoran Avalanche Center on Instagram: “Our first song about ba…
The Land Desk has been talking a lot about the effects the low snowpack will have on water supplies, Lake Powell, and irrigators. But it’s also hurting the ski industry — Vail Resorts reported a 20% drop in skier visits this winter — and that’s hurting the communities and workers that rely on that industry. The news clip below reports on how a Summit County food bank is being overwhelmed by new demand this winter.
The median home price in Summit County, by the way, is about $995,000.
🗺️ Messing with Maps 🧭
Detail from Clason’s Industrial Map of Colorado, circa 1904. Unfortunately, I only had space for one outtake from this one, so look for more in the future, because it’s cool. Note how back then the road from Naturita to Norwood followed the San Miguel River to Piñon before heading south to Coventry (which is now Redvale, I guess?). Also, the towns of Hydraulic and Uranium on the Dolores River downstream from the confluence with the San Miguel. If anyone can point out those locations on a modern map, I’d be much obliged!
If you’ve ever floated the Gunnison River in western Colorado through the Dominguez-Escalante National Conservation Area between Delta and Grand Junction, you’ve probably noticed that the land on either side of the stream alternates between public parcels and private ranch land. If the Bureau of Land Management has its way, some 4,000 acres of that private land will soon be entering the public domain, according to reporting from the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel. That’s right, the agency is putting more lovely land into the public’s hands.
The parcels were formerly operated as a ranch by Dick Miller. After he died, the Conservation Fund purchased the land from Miller’s son for an undisclosed amount in order to sell it to the BLM. The associated BLM grazing leases will reportedly be transferred back to the BLM, but it isn’t clear whether they’ll be made available for grazing again.
The BLM is also looking to put a lot of public land into oil and gas companies’ hands. The agency is seeking public input on proposals to lease 74 parcels covering 33,530 acres in New Mexico, and 271 oil and gas parcels totaling 357,358 acres in Wyoming.
The New Mexico parcels are mostly in the Permian Basin, but do include tracts in the San Juan Basin located north and northeast of Chaco Culture National Historical Park (but not within the ten-mile buffer zone, which remains in place — for now).
The Wyoming parcels are concentrated in the southern part of the state between Rawlins and Green River, the central part of the state, and the Powder River Basin.
🦫 Wildlife Watch 🦅
Wolves in the West have had a rough go of it ever since white settlers showed up in the 1800s and proceeded to slaughter them en masse. And while they’ve been able to recover somewhat in the Northern Rockies, thanks in part to endangered species protections and reintroduction efforts, the move to bring them back to Colorado and the Southwest has hit obstacles — and tragedy, including:
Another reintroduced wolf has died in Colorado, reports the Colorado Sun’s Tracy Ross, bringing the total number of wolf fatalities since the start of reintroduction to 11. The cause of death has not been determined.
Meanwhile, Colorado Parks and Wildlife has paused new wolf reintroductions because it hasn’t been able to find another state or tribal nation to provide the animals.
Utah Department of Agriculture officials killed three wolves in the northern part of the state on Jan. 9. While wolves are protected by the Endangered Species Act in most of the state, they were delisted in one small section along the Wyoming border when protections were lifted for the Northern Rockies population. Now, apparently, the state will kill any wolves that wander into that area, just because they can, and to prevent them from going into the protected zone. That’s despite the fact that the three animals had not killed or stalked any livestock. “I have not heard any of my neighbors, and we haven’t had the experience ourselves that we’ve had actual issues with our cattle and wolves,” area livestock owner Launie Evans told KSL.
And in more sad news: “Taylor,” the Mexican gray wolf that wandered out of southern New Mexico and into the Mt. Taylor region, was found dead on I-40 near Grants. Taylor first roamed onto Mt. Taylor early last year, apparently not realizing that the feds don’t allow wolves to cross I-40. Wildlife officials captured him and deported him back to the southland, but he was persistent, and simply turned around and headed north again. He was removed again in November, but couldn’t stay away from Mt. Taylor. This time, on his return journey, he was struck by a vehicle.
“Taylor’s death is a heartbreaking reminder that highways like I-40 are not just lines on a map, they are lethal barriers for wildlife,” said Claire Musser, executive director of the Grand Canyon Wolf Recovery Project, in a statement. “Abolishing I-40 as a management boundary is long overdue. If we are serious about recovery, we must allow wolves to move freely across suitable habitats and invest in wildlife crossings and landscape-scale connectivity so highways no longer function as death traps.”
And, finally, CPW’s latest map of wolf activity is out (at the top of this section), and it shows that wolves have been wandering into new parts of the state. Folks in the Silverton area might just be seeing some soon. If you think you see one, but aren’t sure if it’s a wolf or coyote, this little guide from CPW might help:
Public Citizen just released an accounting of some of the ways the Trump administration is subsidizing global mining corporations and their operations on public lands — and the ways in which executives made off like bandits as a result. It’s worth reading the whole report, but here are just a small sampling of highlights:
$8.8 million: Amount 13 mining corporations, including Rio Tinto, Resolution Copper, South32, Lithium Americas, and Ambler Metals, spent on lobbying in 2025.
$3.5 million: Amount Lithium America paid Interior Department official Karen Budd-Falen’s husband for water rights for its Thacker Pass mine in Nevada. The federal government also took a 5% stake in the company and the mine as a condition of preserving a Biden-era loan.
$400 million: Amount the U.S. Defense Department paid for a stake in Las Vegas-based MP Materials, which owns the Mountain Pass rare earths mine in California. The Pentagon also loaned the company $150 million.
The Bureau of Land Management approved the Grassy Mountain gold and silver mine on 469 acres of public land in Malheur County, Oregon. The action allows Paramount Gold Nevada to develop an underground mine, an onsite mill, and “associated storage” (which I’m taking to mean they’ll be able to dispose of toxic mill tailings on public land mining claims).
📖 Reading (and watching) Room 🧐
Here’s a great piece by Leah Sottile, who has written authoritatively on right-wing movements and more, on the plague of hypocrisy going around right now.
The Border Chronicle is indispensable reading these days and, well, always. This piece, titled Border Patrol Nation, is an important look at the violent history of the Border Patrol.
Speaking of hypocrisy: I’m sure most of you have heard Trump administration officials saying that federal ICE and/or CPB agents shot Alex Pretti because he brought a gun to a protest. The photos below were all captured at the May 2014 Recapture rally in Blanding, Utah. Quite a few of the attendees — who were on hand to protest “federal overreach” — were armed. None of them were shot. Just sayin’.
Folks exercising the right to bear arms at Recapture Canyon to protest federal overreach. Photo credit: Jonathan P. Thompson
Silverton, Colorado is pictured in this William Henry Jackson photograph dated between 1876 and 1880. (Courtesy of Denver Public Library Digital Collections, X-1717)
In the years leading up to Colorado statehood, nearly all of the territory’s western half still belonged to the Ute people, who had inhabited the northern Colorado Plateau for centuries.
An 1868 treaty between the U.S. government and six bands of the Ute tribe reserved nearly all of the western half of the Colorado Territory for their “absolute and undisturbed use and occupation,” and stated that “no persons … shall ever be permitted to pass over, settle upon, or reside in the territory described.”
The agreement lasted just four years.
Ouray and subchiefs, 1873. Ute Indians and agents in Washington, DC after conclusion of the 1873 Brunot Agreement. Front row, left to right: Guero, Chipeta, Ouray, and Piah; second row: Uriah M. Curtis, James B. Thompson, Charles Adams, and Otto Mears; back row: Washington, Susan (Ouray’s sister), Johnson, Jack, and John. Photo credit: Colorado Encyclopedia
By 1872 prospectors for gold and silver in the San Juan Mountains were routinely trespassing on Ute lands, and the following year the federal government — under pressure from territorial leaders demanding access to the region’s “large bodies of mineral and agricultural resources” — pushed the Utes to cede a 3.7-million-acre area surrounding the San Juans in what was known as the Brunot Agreement.
So began the Colorado Territory’s next major mining boom, and the first to be concerned principally with silver — the extraction and minting of which would dominate the soon-to-be state’s economy and politics for the next several decades.
By 1876, fortune seekers could reach the San Juans by taking the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad to Cañon City, and from there traveling on grueling mountain toll roads to mining settlements like Ouray, Silverton and Lake City. In late January 1876, the Silver World of Lake City advised that despite “the unusual quantity of snow,” the wagon road that passed through Saguache was manageable with sleighs, but the more southerly route through Del Norte was “almost impassable.”
(Courtesy of the Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection, Colorado State Library)
The silver rush had helped revive the fortunes of southern Colorado, turning towns like Pueblo and Cañon City, where residents had long felt ignored by the territory’s northern establishment, into important transportation and commercial hubs serving the remote San Juan mining district.
Other Front Range towns, including Colorado Springs, regretted “the outflow of men consequent upon the San Juan and other mining excitements.” A gold rush to the Black Hills of the Dakota Territory was also underway at the time — another treaty-breaking incursion into Native American lands, which would soon lead to a war with the Lakota people and the Battle of Little Bighorn later in 1876.
The San Juan mines, wrote the Silver World, required “earnest, energetic men … who can submit to the deprivation of the luxuries of a higher civilization.” The paper’s weekly editions from the winter of 1876 contained few reports of serious crime, though the threat of “snowslides,” frostbite and mountain lions were often mentioned.
But by then the region’s boomtowns were beginning to evolve from rough-and-ready mining camps into something more established — incorporating municipal governments, forming school districts and issuing bonds for the construction of new wagon roads and other public improvements. Ordinances approved by Lake City’s new board of trustees included a schedule of fines levied for misdemeanors, published in the Silver World on Jan. 15.
“Read the ordinances which appear in this issue,” the paper’s editors advised, “and save yourself the possibility of being fined or getting in the ‘jug.’”
Public intoxication or animal cruelty could cost an offender up to $50, while the penalty for impersonating a police officer or “immoderately” riding or driving horses on town streets could run up to $100. To “quarrel in a boisterous manner” was considered a breach of the peace and carried a fine of between $5 and $25.
Arriving in Denver for the meeting of the territorial Legislature in January, Rep. Reuben J. McNutt of Silverton had brought a petition from his fellow settlers for the creation of a new county encompassing the western San Juan boomtowns. The Legislature soon passed House Bill No. 1, and Gov. John Routt signed it into law on Jan. 31, officially creating the new San Juan County, from which the present-day counties of Ouray, San Miguel and Dolores would later be carved out.
Alongside these administrative necessities, some inhabitants of the remote mining towns aimed for the cultural betterment of settlements like Lake City, where the Silver World reported billiards were still the “principal amusement.” The Lake City Dramatic Club staged its first theater production on Feb. 2, 1876, performing George Melville Baker’s “Among the Breakers,” and the cast of amateurs won a rave review from the local paper.
“The universal testimony of all who witnessed it was that it would have been difficult for professionals to have surpassed it,” declared the Silver World. “The play was in all respect (was) well mounted and in no instance were there any of those hitches so common in entertainments of this nature, and which tend alike to embarrass the performers and distract the attention of the audience.”
The gradual dispossession of Ute lands in western Colorado would not end with the Brunot Agreement and the rush to the San Juans. The so-called northern or White River Utes were expelled from Colorado beginning in 1880, and today reside on the Uinta and Ouray Indian Reservation in Utah. Three other bands of the tribe grouped together as the southern Utes — the Capote, Mouache, and Weenuche — agreed in 1878 to cede all but a small portion of their lands in far southwest Colorado along the New Mexico border.
The southern Utes later split into the Southern Ute Indian Tribe, consisting of the Capote and Mouache bands, and Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, made up of the Weenuche band. Today, the Southern Ute and the Ute Mountain Ute are the only two federally-recognized tribes within Colorado’s borders.
I started the Land Desk five years ago this month to fill what I saw as a gap in coverage of public lands, energy, climate, water, economics, and communities in the Western U.S. — along with the politics around all of those issues. I certainly wasn’t planning on covering national or partisan politics.
But it so happens that my first dispatch ran four days after the infamous events of Jan. 6, 2021, which had echoes — if not direct connections — to Western land-use politics. So, less than a week after launching, I found myself, well, delving into national partisan politics.
The United States is again in turmoil, the administration is a full-on dumpster fire, and federal agents are executing people in the streets of Minneapolis — and then lying about it and slandering the victim.
To say I’m horrified, outraged, and heartbroken would be an understatement.
I’m not going to offer any analysis here — others have done a much better job than I could. But I would plea with and urge Western elected officials from both parties to stand up and do whatever you can to curb these authoritarian and reprehensible actions, even if it means shutting down the government, and to hold the administration accountable. [ed. emphasis mine]
On a brighter note, it is the Land Desk’s fifth birthday this month. Actually, it was on Jan. 10, and I totally missed it until now. I just want to take this opportunity to thank all of my readers, but especially the Founding and Sustaining Members and the other paid subscribers and “Buy Me a Coffee” supporters who keep this thing — and the Silver Bullet and now El Burro Blanco — going. I couldn’t do it without you.
☘️ Annals of Alfalfa 🍀
Yes, I’m going to talk about alfalfa. Again. Why? Because the Colorado River is on my mind, and as John Fleck, author, former journalist, and Writer in Residence at the Utton Transboundary Resources Center at the University of New Mexico School of Law, once wrote: “Golf and the Bellagio Fountain are easy targets. But if you’re not talking about alfalfa, you’re not being serious.”
That’s because alfalfa and, to a lesser degree, other livestock forage crops, are collectively the largest users of Colorado River water. So, any serious efforts to cut consumption on the river are going to involve alfalfa, in some form or another. In recent years, this has included paying farmers to fallow some of their alfalfa fields and leave the water in the ditches, canals, or the river.
But a report1published last year2 posits a less extreme solution: Keeping the alfalfa, but watering it less during the summer months in dry years — a practice known as deficit irrigation. The farmer could then sell the surplus water to other users to offset the losses resulting from lower crop yields. The authors estimate that this approach could save up to 3.4 million acre-feet of water annually across the Southwest3, or about 50% of total alfalfa water use.
In some ways, this method is analogous to something called “demand response” on electrical power grids. That’s when large power users, or a collection of smaller users, are paid to reduce electricity consumption during times of high demand to ease grid strain. So, for example, during a heat wave, when everyone’s air conditioners are running full blast, the utility or grid operator would signal a factory, say, or a data center to scale back their operations during the hottest time of the day when solar generation might be dropping off. The targeted drop in consumption has the same effect as increasing power generation would, keeping supply and demand in balance.
Alfalfa is a good crop for water-demand-response in part because it uses a lot of water in the first place, but also because putting it on a temporary water diet won’t kill it. The authors argue that this approach is preferable to fallowing fields, replacing alfalfa with other crops, or even increasing irrigation efficiency. Alfalfa is high in nutrients and digestible fiber, making it a valuable livestock feed; its deep roots facilitate nitrogen fixation; and it has high salt tolerance.
They note that drip irrigation and fertigation (a new term to me that is where liquid fertilizer is applied with irrigation water) have increased crop yields, but have also resulted in “a water savings paradox, especially greater net consumptive use (CU) due to expansion of cropped areas and reduced groundwater recharge and return flows to streams.” Fallowing, meanwhile, has its own unintended economic and environmental consequences, including increased weeds and dust mobilization, loss of green space, and loss of wildlife habitat.
In addition to saving between 16% and 50% of water used to irrigate alfalfa, the authors write, “Summer deficit irrigation could also be an attractive strategy for alfalfa growers particularly if market water prices at the peak of the growing season are high enough to offset the remaining alfalfa cutting revenues.”
It all sounds good on paper, but implementing it in the fields would be far more complicated than simply shutting off the ditches for a couple of months. And whether this approach could actually pay for itself depends on the price of alfalfa, the price of water, and on whether it’s logistically feasible to sell the saved water to someone else.
Still, deficit irrigation is certainly one useful tool for farmers and water managers to consider. Because cuts are coming to the Colorado River one way or another. And it behooves everyone to make it as painless as possible.
📈 Data Dump 📊
Here’s a few alfalfa charts for your perusing pleasure.
Alfalfa acreage has decreased in most states over the last several years. Data Source: National Agricultural Statistics Service.
Top ten Western counties for acreage planted in alfalfa. Data Source: USDA NASS.
Colorado River state alfalfa production increased steadily over the decades before peaking in the early 2000s. Then, as the megadrought/long-term aridification settled in, it started decreasing. Data Source: NASS
Hay exports, especially to China, have dropped off considerably in recent years after a steady climb. This may have to do with the Trump administration’s tariffs. Source: Foreign Agriculture Service.
California’s largest hay export market used to be China. Source: FAS
Arizona’s biggest hay export market has long been Saudi Arabia, but that has dropped off in the last year. Source: FAS.
🔋Notes from the Energy Transition 🔌
In somewhat related news: The vast and powerful Westlands Water District has voted to move forward on a plan to build up to 21 gigawatts of new solar-plus-battery energy storage capacity on fallow, water-constrained agricultural fields in the San Joaquin Valley. In choosing this path, the water district defied the growing anti-solar backlash that seems to have infected even more progressive areas. And it opened the door for farmers to continue to earn an income on land that they simply can’t farm anymore because the water is no longer there. As a Westlands representative told Canary Media, it will “give farmers another crop to grow, which is the sun.”
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Rio Tinto/Kennecott’s Bingham Canyon copper mine in the snow. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Rio Tinto’s Kennecott copper mining and smelting operation near Salt Lake City is the state’s largest polluter, spewing about 193 million pounds of toxic chemicals into the air each year. That kind of puts a grimy shadow over the company’s efforts to become more sustainable — like switching from diesel to battery-electric trucks — but it is better than business as usual, I suppose. And on that note, they are bringing online a 25 megawatt solar array to help power its operations, which is notable since they have started to produce tellurium, an ingredient in photovoltaic panels.
***
I have similarly mixed feelings about this next news item: MGM Resorts just acquired more solar power, bringing their onsite and offsite solar-plus-storage facilities combined capacity to a whopping 215 megawatts, allowing the company to meet up to 100% of daytime electricity load at its Las Vegas Strip operations.
1 “Reimagining alfalfa as a flexible crop for water security in the Southwestern USA,” by Emily Waring, et al.
Grosvenor Arch in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Credit: (c) TimPetersonPhotography.com
January 26, 2026
A Government Accountability Office opinion found that the resource management plan for the Utah monument must undergo congressional review, which could lead to a new policy that is far friendlier to development of the protected area.
A recent, non-binding opinion from the Government Accountability Office may pave the way for Congress to begin rescinding management plans for national monuments across the country, environmentalists and experts say, potentially leading to protected areas being further opened up for resource extraction. And Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah is yet again at the center of the renewed threats to the nation’s monuments.
Designated by President Bill Clinton in 1996 and spanning 1.87 million acres of public land, it protects scores of wildlife, archeological resources and sacred sites for local tribes. Despite vast public support for the monument, Utah Republicans in Congress and the Trump administration for years worked to dismantle and downsize it, with the first Trump administration cutting 900,000 acres from the monument before the Biden administration restored it to its original size.
The monument’s resource management plan, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) opinion finds, must undergo congressional review. Local tribes and environmental groups expect Utah’s congressional delegation to introduce a “resolution of disapproval” in the House of Representatives to overturn the monument’s management plan using the Congressional Review Act (CRA)—a 1996 law that Congress enacted to overturn certain federal agency actions through a special review process. Then Congress would have 60 days to vote on the matter. If the management plan is rescinded, the CRA requires any new plan to be substantially different from the current one that prioritizes conservation.
“Utah politicians are at it again, doing whatever they can to erode protections for our public lands,” said Tom Delehanty, senior attorney at Earthjustice, in a statement. “The monument management plan was created by local officials, Tribes, and communities working together to provide certainty in how this national treasure is managed and protected. Now Utah’s elected officials want to flush that effort down the toilet — a situation that benefits no one.”
Downsizing or rescinding national monuments has been a major goal of the Trump administration. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum issued secretarial orders calling for the review of national monuments to determine which should be downsized or eliminated to make way for more resource extraction. The Department of Justice, at the White House’s request, issued an opinion that the president has the power to review and eliminate national monuments. The Trump administration eliminated the two most recently created national monuments in California, but then walked back that decision.
The administration’s threats to the nation’s national monuments have been met with protests across the country. Polling has shown that presidential use of the Antiquities Act to create national monuments is widely popular, and polling in Utah shows that three-fourths of registered voters support Grand Staircase-Escalante.
Last year, the GAO issued similar opinions regarding resource management plans issued by BLM field offices, which Congress then struck down. But those previous decisions were all for general, multi-use public lands, not national monuments.
Steve Bloch, legal director at the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, said the newest GAO opinion is a major escalation of efforts to upend land management plans, and targets national monuments specifically rather than public lands in general. This month, Congress has extended the use of the CRA to include overturning protections from mining for Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, an unprecedented move to rescind an executive mineral withdrawal to allow a mine to be permitted in the area.
Resource management plans are the blueprint for how the Bureau of Land Management, which manages Grand Staircase, and other land agencies oversee protected lands, he said, guiding everything from how to protect endangered species to where new bathrooms can be built. Unlike other overturned management plans under the CRA, the overarching priority for monuments is protecting resources, he said.
For Grand Staircase, those include preserved fossils, cultural sites and unique biology and geology, Bloch said. Overturning the plan will only lead to confusion.
Ancient Pictographs in Catstair Canyon in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument with modern graffiti defacing the nearby rock. Credit: (c) Tim Peterson
“We know in a place like Grand Staircase, confusion can breed on the ground impacts,” he said.
Last June, Utah Rep. Celeste Maloy, a Republican representing the district encompassing Grand Staircase-Escalante and a vocal opponent of the Antiquities Act that allows presidents to designate national monuments, wrote a letter to the GAO requesting its opinion on whether the recently approved management plan for the monument was a formal “rule”—a legally binding decision issued by federal agencies. Management plans issued by the Bureau of Land Management or other land agencies have historically not been viewed as such and have consequently not been subject to the CRA.
But the GAO’s opinion found that a resource management plan is a formal rule because it has a “future effect” on how the land within the monument is managed and has “substantial effect on non-agency parties,” such as limiting cattle grazing, mining, logging and the use of off-highway vehicles in sensitive areas.
Many of the monuments targeted are significant to local tribes, which has been a top consideration in their management. Last year, the Hopi Tribe, the Navajo Nation, the Kaibab Band of Paiute Indians, the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah, the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe and the Zuni Tribe formed the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument Inter-Tribal Coalition to advocate for the protection of the monument and help shape how it is managed. The coalition has strongly denounced the GAO’s opinion and has urged members of Congress not to overturn the current resource management plan.
Without a strong plan, the coalition said, the tribes’ ancestral lands and cultural sites will be at risk of looting and degradation.
“Whether it is through the careful stewardship of sacred sites, educating others about our respective cultures, or the deliberations that guide the balance between access and protection, our active participation in these processes reflects our sovereignty and our commitment to a shared future,” said Cassidy K. Morgan, programs and projects specialist with the Navajo Nation Heritage and Historic Preservation Department who is a member of the coalition, in a statement. “Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument reflects a truth we hold sacred: the land is inseparable from who we are. No matter the complexity of today’s debates, our guiding principle is clear: these places must be protected and honored as part of our shared heritage and as part of the life-giving system of Mother Earth.”
The Antiquities Act of 1906 was signed into law by Theodore Roosevelt, for “… the protection of objects of historic and scientific interest” through the designation of national monuments by the President and Congress. National monuments are one of the types of specially-designated areas that make up the BLM’s National Conservation Lands. Some of the earliest national monuments included Devils Tower, the Grand Canyon, and Death Valley. They were initially protected by the War Department, then later by the National Park Service. More recently, the BLM and other Federal agencies have retained stewardship responsibilities for national monuments on public lands. In fact, the BLM manages more acres of national monuments in the continental U. S. than any other agency. This includes the largest land-based national monument, the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah featured here. National monuments under the BLM’s stewardship have yielded numerous scientific discoveries, ranging from fossils of previously unknown dinosaurs to new theories about prehistoric cultures. They provide places to view some of America’s darkest night skies, most unique wildlife, and treasured archaeological resources. In total, twenty BLM-managed national monuments, covering over five million acres, are found throughout the western U. S. and offer endless opportunities for discovery. Photos and description by Bob Wick, BLM.
The Antiquities Act of 1906 was signed into law by Theodore Roosevelt, for “… the protection of objects of historic and scientific interest” through the designation of national monuments by the President and Congress. National monuments are one of the types of specially-designated areas that make up the BLM’s National Conservation Lands. Some of the earliest national monuments included Devils Tower, the Grand Canyon, and Death Valley. They were initially protected by the War Department, then later by the National Park Service. More recently, the BLM and other Federal agencies have retained stewardship responsibilities for national monuments on public lands. In fact, the BLM manages more acres of national monuments in the continental U. S. than any other agency. This includes the largest land-based national monument, the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah featured here. National monuments under the BLM’s stewardship have yielded numerous scientific discoveries, ranging from fossils of previously unknown dinosaurs to new theories about prehistoric cultures. They provide places to view some of America’s darkest night skies, most unique wildlife, and treasured archaeological resources. In total, twenty BLM-managed national monuments, covering over five million acres, are found throughout the western U. S. and offer endless opportunities for discovery. Photos and description by Bob Wick, BLM.
St. George, in Utah’s southwest corner, is one of the nation’s fastest growing communities. This is partly because of a nice climate, access to a major interstate, and relative closeness to Salt Lake City and Las Vegas. But it’s also because the landscape in which it sits is stunning, characterized by burnished red sandstone punctuated by dark volcanic formations and the green ribbons of the Santa Clara and Virgin Rivers, all set against the backdrop of the Pine Valley Mountains. In 2009, Congress created the Red Cliffs National Conservation Area on about 45,000 acres of BLM land just north of St. George to protect some of this landscape and its wildlife, and to offer a refuge from the burgeoning mass of humanity.
Satellite view of St. George, the southern end of the Red Cliff National Conservation Area, and the proposed highway corridor just approved by the BLM (in purple). The highway would fragment desert tortoise habitat and near-town hiking areas. Google Earth image.
But the Trump administration — and the state of Utah — have other plans. This week, the Bureau of Land Management approved Utah’s plans to build a four-lane highwaythrough the south end of the conservation area. The stated aim is to accommodate growth, reduce congestion, and speed up the car trip from one section of sprawl to another. But really it will only induce growth and more traffic, while also diminishing one of St. George’s most appealing assets.
The idea for a Northern Corridor Highway has been bantered about for a couple of decades. The proposal seemed to perish in 2016, when the BLM denied Washington County’s bid to build the road through the national conservation area. But when Donald Trump was elected president the first time, the county and the Utah Department of Transportation seized the opportunity to apply for a right of way to build a 4.5 mile, four-lane highway across a portion of the conservation area.
Red Cliff National Conservation Area. The Northern Corridor Highway would connect to the Red Hills Parkway in the mid-ground of the photo about one-third of the way in from the left. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
In January 2021, the outgoing Trump administration’s BLM approved the right of way, even though its own analysis acknowledged that it would destroy tortoise habitat, spread invasive species, and essentially chop off the southern end of the conservation area, destroying trails and damaging the recreation experience. A large coalition of environmental groups under the banner of the Red Cliffs Conservation Coalition sued the BLM, and the agency ultimately agreed to redo the environmental analysis — finally rejecting the proposed highway at the end of 2024 and recommending an expansion of the existing Red Hills Parkway, instead.
Once Biden was out of office, however, the state and Washington County once again appealed to the feds to grant them a right-of-way, arguing that the Red Hills Parkway idea was not feasible. And since the Trump administration and Utah’s elected leaders tend to value roads and more suburban sprawl over tortoises, beauty, and the thriving desert landscape, the BLM opened the door to bulldoze more land to indulge Utah’s road fetish and to make way for yet another monument to America’s car-centric culture.
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A couple of dispatches ago, I wrote about how curious it was that the Trump administration had yet to move to diminish or eliminate any national monuments during this second term. It may be because they are outsourcing the task to Congress.
Utah’s congressional delegation is expected to introduce federal legislation that would use the Congressional Review Act to overturn the Biden-era Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument management plan. If the “resolution of disapproval” passes both chambers of Congress with a simple majority vote, it would erase the plan and bar the Bureau of Land Management from issuing another plan that is “substantially the same” in the future.
This wouldn’t change the boundaries of the monument, but would likely cause management of the area to revert back to the 2020, Trump I-era plan. That plan was not only less protective than the newer one, but only applied to a much smaller area, since in 2017 Trump had significantly shrunk the national monument. Revoking the current management plan, then, would leave vast areas of the monument in a sort of management limbo.
“I strongly denounce any attempt to use the Congressional Review Act to overturn the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument Resource Management Plan. This plan reflects years of public input, scientific research, and meaningful Tribal consultation, and dismantling it through procedural shortcuts undermines good governance, responsible land stewardship, and the protection of irreplaceable cultural landscapes,” said Autumn Gillard, Southern Paiute,Grand Staircase-Escalante Inter-Tribal Coalitionmember, in a written statement. “At this time, I urge lawmakers from both sides of the aisle to uphold the approved resource management plan from January 2025.”
Utah officials often say they dislike new national monument designations because, in their minds, protecting land and cultural resources is bad for the economy, mostly because they block new mining and drilling. A new study shows they are wrong.
Headwaters Economics analyzed economic conditions and trends in 30 national monument gateway communities, and found that national monument designations do not disrupt local economies. They also don’t give nearby communities a substantial economic boost. “Employment and population trends continue on the same trajectory after designation,” Headwaters found, “and income growth tends to improve modestly over time.”
From Headwaters Economics’ economic performance of communities near national monuments report.
The findings match up with what one would intuitively expect. National monuments are rarely designated in areas that are currently targeted for new drilling and mining, meaning they are unlikely to affect the existing extractive economies. Meanwhile, they are often established in places that are already experiencing an increase in visitation, meaning that designation wouldn’t necessarily cause a significant jump in tourism.
Take Bears Ears National Monument, for example. It was established in 2016 on federal land in San Juan County, Utah. Both the oil and gas and uranium mining industries were (and are) active in the county. But they weren’t interested in drilling new wells or opening new mines within the monument’s boundaries. Previous oil and gas wells had mostly come up dry — drillers have found much more success in the Aneth and McElmo fields east of the monument. And the Daneros uranium mine, which is been on standby status for years, is outside the boundaries, as well. In other words, monument designation had absolutely zero effect on either industry.
Meanwhile, fears that establishing a national monument in this corner of southeastern Utah would lead to its “discovery” by the masses were overblown, simply because the internet and social media had already lured folks to the area. Indeed, part of the reason people pushed for designation was to try to get a handle on increased visitation and its impacts on natural and cultural resources.
Headwaters has a nice interactive graphic on which you can check out the economic trends around the 30 national monuments. The trends, themselves, are interesting to see: They make it abundantly clear that other factors, especially COVID-19, had a much bigger effect than any national monument designation.
The Big Data Center Buildup is accelerating. Nearly every day I get news of another proposed hyperscale facility somewhere in the West. A lot of them are not planning on connecting to the power grid, which is good for other utility users, because they won’t have to pay for associated infrastructure upgrades. But in almost every case, their proposed power sources include at least some gas-fired generation. And natural gas, i.e. methane, is not clean energy by any means.
So, while the data center boom has the potential to accelerate the clean energy transition by encouraging more solar, wind, and battery storage, it is also slowing the transition by perpetuating fossil fuel burning and even prompting construction of new fossil fuel-fired facilities.
Projects that have come onto my radar recently include:
Laramie County, Wyoming’s commissioners approved Crusoe Energy Systems’ and Tallgrass’ proposed AI data center complex near Cheyenne, despite residents’ pushback over the project’s massive scale. If this thing is built as planned, it will be ginormous, with estimated capital costs of $50 billion. That would not only include the Project Jade’s five data centers and associated structures, but also a 2,700 MW gas-fired power plant — which would be among the largest of its kind in the West. The developers plan to use a closed-loop cooling system, which is less water-intensive than conventional evaporative systems but uses more energy.
About 150 miles west of there, Power Company of Wyoming, an Anschutz Corporation subsidiary, is proposing a 2,000 MW gas generating facility in Carbon County to serve growing data center-driven power demand. These are the same folks who are building the Chokecherry Sierra Madre wind project and the TransWest Express transmission line. The controversial, 732-mile TransWest Express was originally billed as a clean-energy line that would carry Wyoming wind to California. Looks like it also will be moving fossil fuel-fired power, as well.
Residents of Surprise, Arizona, a section of Phoenix’s sprawl, are getting a little surprise of their own: A proposed data center and dedicated 700 MW natural gas plant adjacent to a residential neighborhood. Residents are not too pleased, according to a story in the Arizona Republic, and are worried about the environmental and health impacts of a gas plant and the data center. The data center would run off the gas plant for the first couple years of operation before connecting with the grid. Then the plant would serve as backup for the center as well as a “peaker” plant, meaning it is fired up during peak demand.
🫣 Correction 🙀
In this week’s Colorado River glossary and primer I inadvertently shrunk the Colorado River watershed quite significantly by leaving out two zeros. It covers about 250,000 square miles, not 2,500. Duh.
Cool Opportunity
The Wright-Ingraham Institute is now taking applications for its three-week immersive fellowship for graduate students and early-career professionals in science, design, policy, the arts, and beyond. This year’s field workshop focuses is on “designing for adaptation in a time of prolonged drought,” and will be held in the San Luis Valley and Taos Plateau from July 6-27. Read more and apply here.
📸 Parting Shot 🎞️
This one popped up on my Facebook feed and I just had to purloin it. It’s downtown Grand Junction in the 1960s (I believe), not long after they refashioned the main drag to make it more people-friendly. It’s funny because a lot of folks in my hometown of Durango are freaking out about a proposal to do something kind of like this, but even less radical, to its downtown. They claim that widening sidewalks and so forth will destroy the historic integrity of the streetscape. In my mind, this photo illustrates how untrue that claim is.
Karen Budd-Falen, the No. 3 at the Interior Department, didn’t disclose a $3.5 million water-rights contract between her husband and the developers of a Nevada mine, records show.
A high-ranking official in the Interior Department is drawing scrutiny from ethics experts because she failed to disclose her family’s financial interest in the nation’s largest lithium mine that had been approved by her agency, according to state and federal records. In 2018 Frank Falen sold water from a family ranch in northern Nevada to Lithium Nevada Corp., a subsidiary of Lithium Americas, for $3.5 million. The company was planning a $2.2 billion lithium mine nearby called Thacker Pass, and lithium mining requires significant amounts of water. The mine needed a permit from the Interior Department, where Mr. Falen’s wife, Karen Budd-Falen, worked as the deputy solicitor responsible for wildlife from 2018 until 2021. She returned to the agency last year and is now the associate deputy secretary, the third highest-ranking position. Mr. Falen’s sale of his water rights also depended on the mine getting a permit from the Interior Department. Without it, Lithium Nevada Corp. could have terminated its deal with him…In November 2019, about two years before the agency approved the mine, Ms. Budd-Falen met with Lithium Americas executives over lunch in the cafeteria at the Interior Department.
Tim Crowley, a spokesman for Lithium Americas, said executives did not discuss the mine or pending environmental reviews with Ms. Budd-Falen. “We haven’t worked directly with Karen Budd-Falen related to Lithium Americas,” he said in an email, “nor have we ever met with her in a formal capacity regarding our project.”
Ms. Budd-Falen did not respond to questions for this article. Her husband, who was not at the lunch, characterized it in a telephone interview as a social occasion, not a work meeting. He said his wife knew few details about the water contract and may not have known that the company was seeking approval from the Interior Department.
The Colorado River and its woes tend to get all of the attention, but the Southwest’s “other” big river, the Rio Grande, is in even worse shape thanks to a combination of warming temperatures, drought, and overconsumption. That’s become starkly evident in recent years, as the river bed has tended to dry up earlier in the summer and in places where it previously had continued to carry at least some water. Now Brian Richter and his team of researchers have quantified the Rio Grande’s slow demise, and the conclusions they reach are both grim and urgent: Without immediate and substantial cuts in consumption, the river will continue to dry up — as will the farms and, ultimately, the cities that rely on it.
The Rio Grande’s problems are not new. Beginning in the late 1800s, diversions for irrigation in the San Luis Valley — which the river runs through after cascading down from its headwaters in the San Juan Mountains — sometimes left the riverbed “wholly dry,” wrote ichthyologist David Starr Jordan in 1889, “all the water being turned into these ditches. … In some valleys, as in the San Luis, in the dry season there is scarcely a drop of water in the riverbed that has not from one to ten times flowed over some field, while the beds of many considerable streams (Rio la Jara, Rio Alamosa, etc.) are filled with dry clay and dust.”
San Luis Valley farmers gradually began irrigating with pumped groundwater, allowing them to rely less on the ditches (but causing its own problems), and the 1938 Rio Grande Compact forced them to leave more water in the river. While that kept the water flowing through northern and central New Mexico, the Rio Grande’s lower reaches still occasionally dried up.
Then, in the early 2000s, the megadrought — or perhaps permanent aridification — that still plagues the region settled in over the Southwest. [ed. emphasis mine] Snowpack levels in the river’s headwaters shrank, both due to diminishing precipitation and climate change-driven warmer temperatures, which led to runoff and streamflows 17% lower than the 20th century average, according to the new study. And yet, overall consumption has not decreased.
“In recent decades,” the authors write, “river drying has expanded to previously perennial stretches in New Mexico and the Big Bend region. Today, only 15% of the estimated natural flow of the river remains at Anzalduas, Mexico near the river’s delta at the Gulf of Mexico.” Reservoirs, the river’s savings accounts, have been severely drained to the point that they won’t be able to withstand another one or two dry winters. As farmers and other users have increasingly turned to groundwater pumping, aquifers have also been depleted. The situation is clearly unsustainable.
Something’s gotta give on the Rio Grande, and while we may be tempted to target Albuquerque’s sprawl, drying up all of the cities and power plants that rely on the river wouldn’t achieve the necessary cuts.
Source: “Overconsumption gravely threatens water security in the binational Rio Grande-Bravo basin” by Brian Richter et al.
It will come as little surprise to Western water watchers that agriculture is by far the largest water user on the Rio Grande — taking up 87% of direct human consumption — and that alfalfa and other hay crops gulp up the lion’s share, or 52%, of agriculture’s slice of the river pie. This isn’t necessarily because alfalfa and other hays are thirstier than other crops, but because they are so prevalent, covering about 433,000 acres over the entire basin, more than four times as much acreage as cotton.
Source: Overconsumption gravely threatens water security in the binational Rio Grande-Bravo basin
This kind of math means farmers are going to have to bear the brunt of the necessary consumption cuts — either voluntarily or otherwise. In fact, they already have: Between 2000 and 2019, according to the report, Colorado lost 18% of its Rio Grande Basin farmland, New Mexico lost 28%, and the Pecos River sub-basin lost 49% (resulting in a downward trend in agricultural water consumption). Some of this loss was likely incentivized through conservation programs that pay farmers to fallow their fields. But it was also due to financial struggles.
Yet even when farmers are paid a fair price to fallow their fields there can be nasty side effects. Noxious weeds can colonize the soil and spread to neighbors’ farms, it can dry out and mobilize dust that diminishes air quality and the mountain snowpack, and it leaves holes in the cultural fabric of an agriculture-dependent community. If a field’s going to be dried up, it should at least be covered with solar panels.
Another possibility is to switch to crops that use less water. This isn’t easy: Farmers grow alfalfa in the desert because it’s actually quite drought tolerant, doesn’t need to be replanted every year, is less labor-intensive than other crops, is marketable and ships relatively easy, and can grow in all sorts of climates, from the chilly San Luis Valley to the scorching deserts of southern Arizona.
Still, it can be done, as a group of farmers in the San Luis Valley are demonstrating with the Rye Resurgence Project. This effort is not only growing the grain — which uses less water than alfalfa, is good for soil health, and makes good bread and whiskey — but it is also working to create a larger market for it. While it’s only a drop in the bucket, so to speak, this is the sort of effort that, replicated many times across the region, could help balance supply and demand on the river, without putting a bunch of farmers out of business.
Photo credit: The Rye Resurgence Project
***
Oh, and about that other river? You know, the Colorado? Representatives from the seven states failed to come up with a deal on how to manage the river by the Nov. 15 deadline. The feds had mercy on them, giving them until February to sort it all out. I’m not so optimistic, but we’ll see. Personally, I think the only way this will ever work out is if the Colorado River Compact — heck, the entire Law of the River — is scrapped, and the states and the whole process is started from scratch, this time with a much better understanding of exactly how much water is in the river, and with the tribal nations having seats at the table.
⛏️ Mining Monitor ⛏️
There are a bunch of wannabe uranium mining companies out there right now, locating claims and acquiring and selling claims and touting their exploratory drilling results. But there are only a small handful of firms that are actually doing anything resembling mining. One of them is the Canada-based Anfield, which just broke ground on its Velvet-Wood uranium mine in the Lisbon Valley, even without all of the necessary state permits.
Now Anfield says it has applied for a Colorado permit to restart its long-idle JD-8uranium mine. The mine is on one of a cluster of Department of Energy leases overlooking the Paradox Valley from its southern slopes, and was previously owned and operated by Cotter Corporation. The mine has not produced ore since at least 2006. Anfield says it will process the ore at its Shootaring Mill near Ticaboo, Utah, which has yet to get Utah’s green light.
🏠 Random Real Estate Room 🤑
Look! Affordable housing near Moab! Sure, it’s a cave, but it’s only $99,000. Oh, what’s that? $998,000? They’re selling a cave for a million buckaroos? But of course they are. To be fair, it’s not just a cave. It’s several of them, plus a trailer. Crazy stuff.
📸 Parting Shot 🎞️
A work train in the Animas River gorge just below Silverton. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Rio Grande and Pecos River basins. Map credit: By Kmusser – Own work, Elevation data from SRTM, drainage basin from GTOPO [1], U.S. stream from the National Atlas [2], all other features from Vector Map., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11218868
The Uncompahgre River flows from Colorado’s San Juan mountains through the towns of Ouray and Ridgway and then into Ridgway Reservoir, which stores water for farms and households downstream. The river is beautiful, but also troubled; runoff from old mines carries heavy metals into the river, and it is pinched into an unnaturally straight and simple channel as it passes from mountain canyon headwaters into an agricultural valley.
As the river moves through the modified channel, it carves deeper into the valley floor and less frequently spills over its bank. As a result, the local water table has dropped, and riverside trees such as cottonwoods have died, impoverishing this important habitat. Water users on the Ward Ditch at the top of the valley were also struggling with broken-down infrastructure, making it difficult to access and manage water for irrigation. This confluence of challenges created a landscape of opportunity for the Uncompahgre Multi-Benefit Project, which addresses environmental problems along the river and water users’ needs, while also improving water quality and reducing flood risks downstream.
Uncompahgre River, Colorado | Hannah Holm
The Project, managed by American Rivers, took an integrated approach to restoring a one-mile stretch of the river, which included replacing and stabilizing the Ward Ditch diversion, notching a historic berm to reconnect the river to its floodplain, and placing rock structures in the river that both protect against bank erosion and improve fish habitat. Meanwhile, ditch and field improvements make it easier to spread water across the land for agriculture and re-establish native vegetation.
Photo credit: American Rivers
Photo credit: American Rivers
In addition to the direct benefits this project delivers for on-site habitat and landowners, the enhanced ability of the river to spread out on its floodplain, both through the ditch diversion and natural processes, also provides downstream benefits. As the water slows and spreads across the floodplain during high flows, its destructive power to erode banks and damage infrastructure downstream is diminished. The same dynamics enable pollutants and sediment from upstream abandoned mines or potential wildfires to settle out before the river flows into the downstream reservoir.
Uncompahgre River, Colorado | Hannah Holm
With construction wrapping up in November 2025, the transformation of this stretch of river and its adjacent floodplain is nearly complete. Fields of flowers and fresh willow plantings are replacing invasive species and dead cottonwoods, and new pools, sandbars, and riffles are providing instream habitat, complementing other organizations’ work to remediate old mines upstream. As a bonus, when the water level is right, the reach has become an inviting run for skilled whitewater boaters.
Until the passage of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) in 1980, miners across the American West extracted gold, silver, and other valuable “hardrock” minerals—and then simply walked away. Today, tens of thousands of these abandoned hardrock mines continue to leak acidic, metal-laden water into pristine streams and wetlands. Federal agencies estimate that over a hundred thousand miles of streams are impaired by mining waste. Nearly half of Western headwater streams are likely contaminated by legacy operations. Despite billions already spent on cleanup at the most hazardous sites, the total cleanup costs remaining may exceed fifty billion dollars.
So how did we end up here? In short, the General Mining Law of 1872 created a lack of accountability for historic mine operators to remediate their operations, but CERCLA and the Clean Water Act (CWA) arguably add an excess of accountability for third parties trying to clean up abandoned mines today.
The Animas River running orange through Durango after the Gold King Mine spill August 2015. Photo credit: Jonathan P. Thompson/The Land Desk
The first legislation to address this problem was introduced in 1999. Many iterations followed and failed, even in the wake of shocking images and costly litigation due to the Gold King Mine spill that dyed the Animas River a vibrant orange in 2015. Finally, in December, 2024, Congress passed the Good Samaritan Remediation of Abandoned Hardrock Mines Act of 2024 (GSA).
The GSA is a cautious, bipartisan attempt to empower volunteers to clean up this toxic legacy. The law creates a short pilot program and releases certain “Good Samaritans” from liability under CERCLA and the CWA, which has long deterred cleanup by groups like state agencies and NGOs. EPA has oversight of the program and the authority to issue permits to Good Samaritans for the proposed cleanup work.
Despite the promise of this new legislation, critical questions remain unanswered about the GSA and how it will work. Only time will tell whether EPA designs and implements an effective permitting program that ensures Good Samaritans complete remediation work safely and effectively. EPA now has the opportunity as the agency that oversees this program to unlock the promise of the GSA.
The GSA left some significant gaps unanswered in how the pilot program will be designed and directed EPA to issue either regulations or guidance to fill in those gaps. EPA missed the statutory deadline to start the rulemaking process (July, 2025) and is now working to issue guidance on how the program will move forward. EPA must provide a 30-day public comment period before finalizing the guidance document according to the GSA. With EPA’s hopes of getting multiple projects approved and shovels in the ground in 2026, the forthcoming guidance is expected to be released soon. While we wait, it’s worth both looking back at what led to the GSA and looking ahead to questions remaining about the implementation of the pilot program.
A Century of Mining the West Without Accountability
The story begins with the General Mining Law of 1872, a relic of the American frontier era that still governs hardrock mining on federal public lands. The law allows citizens and even foreign-based corporations to claim mineral rights and extract valuable ores without paying any federal royalty. Unlike coal, oil, or gas—which fund reclamation through production fees—hardrock mining remains royalty-free.
As mining industrialized during the 20th century, large corporations replaced prospectors. Until 1980, mines were often abandoned without consequences or cleanup once they became unprofitable. The result: an estimated half-million abandoned mine features will continually leach pollution into American watersheds for centuries.
CERLCA Liability Holds Back Many Abandoned Mine Cleanups
Congress sought to address toxic sites through CERCLA, also known as the Superfund law, which makes owners and operators strictly liable for hazardous releases. In theory, that ensures accountability. In practice, it creates a paradox: if no polluter can be found at an abandoned site, anyone who tries to clean up the mess may be held responsible for all past, present, and future pollution.
The Clean Water Act’s Double-Edged Sword
Even state agencies, tribes, or nonprofits that treat contaminated water risk being deemed “operators” of a hazardous facility. That fear of liability—combined with enormous costs—has frozen many potential Good Samaritans in place. Federal efforts to ease this fear have offered little more than reassurance letters without real protection.
The Clean Water Act compounds the problem. Anyone who discharges pollution into a surface water via any discernible, confined and discrete conveyance must hold a point source discharge permit. By requiring these permits and providing for direct citizen enforcement in the form of citizen suits, the CWA has led to significant improvements in water quality across the country. That said, courts have ruled that drainage pipes or diversion channels used to manage runoff from abandoned mines may also qualify as point sources. As a result, Good Samaritans who exercise control over historic point sources, like mine tunnels, could face penalties and other liabilities for unpermitted discharges, even when they improve overall conditions.
The 2024 Good Samaritan Act Steps onto the Scene
After decades of failed attempts, the Good Samaritan Remediation of Abandoned Hardrock Mines Act was signed into law in December, 2024. The GSA authorizes EPA to create a pilot program, issuing up to fifteen permits for low-risk cleanup projects over seven years. Most importantly, permit holders receive protection from Superfund and Clean Water Act liability for their permitted activities. This legal shield removes one of the greatest barriers to cleanup efforts.
Applicants can seek either a Good Samaritan permit to begin active remediation or an investigative sampling permit to scope out a site for potential conversion to a Good Samaritan permit down the road.
In either case, applicants must show:
they had no role in causing, and have never exercised control over, the pollution in their application,
they possess the necessary expertise and adequate funding for all contingencies within their control, and
they are targeting low-risk sites, which are generally understood to be those that require passive treatment methods like moving piles of mine waste away from streams or snowmelt or diverting water polluted with heavy metals below mine tailings toward wetlands that may settle and naturally improve water quality over time
Under the unique provisions of the GSA, each qualifying permit must go through a modified and streamlined National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) review process. EPA or another lead agency must analyze the proposed permit pursuant to an Environmental Assessment (EA). If the lead agency cannot issue a Finding of No Significant Impact (FONSI) after preparing an EA, the permit cannot be issued. The GSA therefore precludes issuance of a permit where the permitted activities may have a significant impact on the environment.
The pilot program only allows for up to fifteen low risk projects that must be approved by EPA over the next seven years. Defining which remediations are sufficiently low-risk becomes critical in determining what the pilot program can prove about the Good Samaritan model for abandoned mine cleanup. To some extent, “low risk” is simply equivalent to a FONSI. But the GSA further defines the low-risk remediation under these pilot permits as “any action to remove, treat, or contain historic mine residue to prevent, minimize, or reduce (i) the release or threat of release of a hazardous substance, pollutant, or contaminant that would harm human health or the environment; or (ii) a migration or discharge of a hazardous substance, pollutant, or contaminant that would harm human health or the environment.”
This excludes “any action that requires plugging, opening, or otherwise altering the portal or adit of the abandoned hardrock mine site…”, such as what led to the Gold King mine disaster. Many active treatment methods are also excluded from the pilot program, therefore, because they often involve opening or plugging adits or other openings to pump out water and treat it in a water treatment plant, either on or off-site. As a result, the Good Sam Act’s low-risk pilot projects focus on passive treatment of the hazardous mine waste or the toxic discharge coming off that waste, such as a diversion of contaminated water into a settlement pond.
The GSA requires that permitted actions partially or completely remediate the historic mine residue at a site. The Administrator of EPA has the discretion to determine whether the permit makes “measurable progress”. Every activity that the Good Samaritan and involved permitted parties take must be designed to “improve or enhance water quality or site-specific soil or sediment quality relevant to the historic mine residue addressed by the remediation plan, including making measurable progress toward achieving applicable water quality standards,” or otherwise protect human health and the environment by preventing the threat of discharge to water, sediment, or soil. The proposed remediation need not achieve the stringent numeric standards required by CERCLA or the CWA.
Furthermore, it can be challenging to determine the discrete difference between the baseline conditions downstream of an acid mine drainage prior to and after a Good Samaritan remediation is completed. Not only do background conditions confuse the picture, but other sources of pollution near the selected project may also make measuring water quality difficult. This may mean that the discretion left to the EPA Administrator to determine “measurable progress” becomes generously applied.
Finally, once EPA grants a permit, the Good Samaritan must follow the terms, conditions, and limitations of the permit. If the Good Samaritan’s work degrades the environment from the baseline conditions, leading to “measurably worse” conditions, EPA must notify and require that the Good Samaritantake “reasonable measures” to correct the surface water quality or other environmental conditions to the baseline. If these efforts do not result in a “measurably adverse impact”, EPA cannot consider this a permit violation or noncompliance. However, if Good Samaritans do not take reasonable measures or if their noncompliance causes a measurable adverse impact, the Good Samaritan must notify all potential impacted parties. If severe enough, EPA has discretion to revoke CERCLA and CWA liability protections.
Recently, EPA shared the following draft flowchart for the permitting process:
Disclaimer: This is being provided as information only and does not impose legally binding requirements on EPA, States, or the public. This cannot be relied upon to create any rights enforceable by any party in litigation with the United States. Any decisions regarding a particular permit will be made based upon the statute and the discretion granted by the statute, including whether or not to grant or deny a permit.
Challenges Facing the Pilot Program Implementation
Despite its promise, the pilot program’s scope is limited. With only fifteen Good Samaritan permits eligible nationwide and no dedicated funding, the law depends on states, tribes, and nonprofits to provide their own resources. The only guidance issued so far by EPA detailed the financial assurance requirements that would-be Good Samaritans must provide to EPA to receive a permit. Definitions provided in this financial assurance guidance raised concerns for mining trade organizations and nonprofits alike with EPA’s proposed interpretations of key terms including “low risk” and “long-term monitoring”. Crucial terms like these, along with terms impacting enforcement when a permitted remediation action goes awry, like “baseline conditions”, “measurably worse”, and “reasonable measures” to restore baseline conditions, are vague in the GSA. How EPA ultimately clarifies terms like these will play a large role in the success of the GSA in its ultimate goal: to prove that Good Samaritans can effectively and safely clean up abandoned hardrock mine sites. The soon-to-be-released guidance document will therefore be a critical moment in the history of this new program.
Funding the Future
Funding remains the greatest barrier to large-scale remediation efforts. Coal mine cleanups are funded through fees on current production under the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act. Current hardrock mining, however, still pays no federal royalty. A modernized system could pair Good Samaritan permitting with industry-funded reclamation fees, ensuring that those profiting from today’s mining help repair the past. Without this reform, the burden will remain on underfunded agencies and nonprofits. However, this General Mining Law reform remains politically unlikely. In the meantime, the GSA creates a Good Samaritan Mine Remediation Fund but does not dedicate any new appropriations to that fund. Grants under Section 319 of the CWA (Nonpoint Source Pollution) and Section 104(k) of CERCLA (Brownfields Revitalization) programs may help, but funding opportunities here are limited.
The GSA includes provisions that allow Good Samaritans to reprocess mine waste while completing Good Samaritan permit cleanup work. These provisions include a key restriction: revenue generated from reprocessing must be dedicated either to the same cleanup project or to the GSA-created fund for future cleanups. A January 20, 2025 executive order to focus on domestic production of critical minerals led to a related Interior secretarial order on July 17, 2025, for federal land management agencies to organize opportunities and data regarding reprocessing mine waste for critical minerals on federal lands. Shortly after these federal policy directives, an August 15, 2025, article in Science suggested that domestic reprocessing of mining by-products like abandoned mine waste has the potential to meet nearly all the domestic demand for critical minerals. Legal and technical hurdles might prevent much reprocessing from occurring within the seven-year pilot program. Reprocessing projections aside, the political appetite for dedicated funding for the future may still grow if the GSA pilot projects successfully prove the Good Samaritan concept using a funding approach reliant on generosity and creativity.
Despite Significant Liability Protections, Good Samaritans Face Uncertainties
While the new law should help to address significant barriers to the cleanup of abandoned mines by Good Samaritans, uncertainties remain. The GSA provides exceptions to certain requirements under the Clean Water Act (including compliance with section 301, 302, 306, 402, and 404). The GSA also provides exceptions to Section 121 of CERCLA, which requires that Superfund cleanups must also meet a comprehensive collection of all relevant and appropriate standards, requirements, criteria, or limitations (ARARs).
In States or in Tribal lands that have been authorized to administer their own point source (section 402) or dredge and fill (section 404) programs under the CWA, the exceptions to obtaining authorizations, licenses, and permits instead applies to those State or Tribal programs. In that case, Good Samaritans are also excepted from applicable State and Tribal requirements, along with all ARARs under Section 121 of CERCLA.
However, Section 121(e)(1) of CERCLA states that remedial actions conducted entirely onsite do not need to obtain any Federal, State, or local permits. Most GSA pilot projects will likely occur entirely onsite, so it is possible that Good Samaritans might still need to comply with local authorizations or licenses, such as land use plans requirements. While it appears that GSA permitted activities are excepted from following relevant and applicable Federal, State, and Tribal environmental and land use processes, it is a bit unclear whether they are also excepted from local decision making.
The liability protections in the GSA are also limited by the terms of the statute. Good Samaritans may still be liable under the CWA and CERCLA if their actions make conditions at the site “measurably worse” as compared to the baseline. In addition, the GSA does not address potential common law liability that might result from unintended accidents. For example, an agricultural water appropriator downstream could sue the Good Samaritan for damages associated with a spike in water acidity due to permitted activities, such as moving a waste rock pile to a safer, permanent location on site.
Finally, the GSA does not clearly address how potential disputes about proposed permits may be reviewed by the federal courts. However, the unique provisions of the GSA, which prohibit issuance of a permit if EPA cannot issue a FONSI, potentially provide an avenue to challenge proposed projects where there is disagreement over the potential benefits and risks of the cleanup activities.
Measuring and Reporting Success of the Pilot Program
The Good Samaritan Act authorizes EPA to issue up to fifteen permits for low-risk abandoned mine cleanups, shielding participants from Superfund and Clean Water Act liability. Applicants must prove prior non-involvement, capability, and target on low-risk sites. Each permit undergoes a streamlined NEPA Environmental Assessment requiring a FONSI. To be successful, EPA and potential Good Samaritans will need to efficiently follow the permit requirements found in the guidance, identify suitable projects, and secure funding. The GSA requires baseline monitoring and post-cleanup reporting for each permitted action but does not require a structured process of learning and adjustment over the course of the pilot program. Without this structured, adaptive approach, it may be difficult for Good Samaritan proponents to collect valuable data and show measurable progress over the next seven years that would justify expanding the Good Samaritan approach to Congress. EPA’s forthcoming guidance offers an opportunity to fix that by publicly adopting a targeted and tiered approach in addition to the obligatory permitting requirements.
The EPA’s David Hockey, who leads the GSA effort from the EPA’s Office of Mountains, Deserts, and Plains based in Denver, has suggested taking just such a flexible, adaptive approach in public meetings discussing the GSA. EPA, working in coordination with partners that led the bill through Congress last year, like Trout Unlimited, intends to approve GSA permits in three tranches. EPA currently estimates that all fifteen projects will be approved and operational by 2028.
The first round will likely approve two or three projects with near-guaranteed success. If all goes according to plan, EPA hopes to have these shovel-ready projects through the GSA permit process, which includes a NEPA review, with the remedial work beginning in 2026. These initial projects will help EPA identify pain points in the process and potentially pivot requirements before issuing a second round of permits. This second tranche will likely occur in different western states and might increase in complexity from the first tranche.
Finally, the third tranche of permits might tackle the more complex projects from a legal and technical standpoint that could still be considered low risk. This may include remediation of sites in Indian Country led by or in cooperation with a Tribal abandoned mine land reclamation program. Other projects suited for the third tranche might include reprocessing of mine waste, tailings, or sludge, which may also require further buy-in to utilize the mining industry’s expertise, facilities, and equipment. These more complex projects will benefit most from building and maintaining local trust and involvement, such as through genuine community dialogue and citizen science partnerships. The third tranche projects should contain such bold choices to fully inform proponents and Congress when they consider expanding the Good Samaritan approach.
EPA appears poised to take a learning-by-doing approach. But the guidance can and should state this by setting public, straightforward, and measurable goals for the pilot program. This is a tremendous opportunity for EPA and everyone who stands to benefit from abandoned mine cleanup. But this is no simple task. Each permit must be flexible enough to address the unique characteristics at each mine site, sparking interest in future legislation so more Good Samaritans can help address the full scale of the abandoned hardrock mine pollution problem. But if EPA abuses its broad discretion under the GSA and moves the goalposts too much during the pilot program, they may reignite criticisms that the Good Samaritan approach undercuts bedrock environmental laws like the Clean Water Act. If projects are not selected carefully, for instance, the EPA could approve a permit that may not be sufficiently “low risk”, or that ultimately makes no “measurable progress” to improve or protect the environment. Either case may invite litigation against the EPA under the Administrative Procedure Act’s arbitrary and capricious standard or bolster other claims against Good Samaritans.
While the GSA itself imposes only a report to Congress at the end of the seven-year pilot period, a five-year interim report to Congress could help ensure accountability. If all goes well or more pilot projects are needed, this interim report could also provide support for an extension before the pilot program expires. The guidance issued by EPA should only be the beginning of the lessons learned and acted on during the GSA pilot program.
Seizing the Window of Opportunity
The GSA represents a breakthrough after decades of gridlock. It addresses the key fears of liability that stymied cleanup. Yet its success will depend on how effectively the EPA implements the pilot program and the courage of Good Samaritans who are stepping into some uncertainty. If it fails, America’s abandoned mines will continue to leak toxins into its headwaters for generations to come. But if the program succeeds, it could become a model for collaborative environmental restoration. For now, the EPA’s forthcoming guidance could mark the first steps toward success through clear permitting requirements and by setting flexible yet strategic goals for the pilot program.
If you are interested in following the implementation of the Good Samaritan Act, EPA recently announced it will host a webinar on December 2, 2025. They will provide a brief background and history of abandoned mine land cleanups, highlight key aspects of the legislation, discuss the permitting process, and explain overall program goals and timelines. Visit EPA’s GSA website for more information.
Map of the San Juan River, a tributary of the Colorado River, in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah, USA. Made using USGS National Map data. By Shannon1 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47456307
Democrats on budget committees tell EPA and Interior to halt potential staff cuts during the shutdown.
White House budget office says $11 billion in Army Corps infrastructure projects will be paused.
BLM will begin an environmental analysis of a proposed expansion of a Mojave Desert gold mine that will need more groundwater to operate.
And lastly, EPA prepares to permit abandoned hardrock mine cleanups under a new Good Samaritan law.
“If you were a nonprofit or a county with a serious water pollution issue coming out of an old set of mine tailings, you could not work on that problem. The moment you touched it, you accepted total liability for the pollution going downstream. So nobody would ever do anything about all these 140,000 abandoned mines. Almost every one of them having some environmental problem. Almost all of it connected to water.” – Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-CO) speaking with the Western Governors’ Association podcast about the problem of cleaning up abandoned mines in the western United States.
Last year the Good Samaritan Remediation of Abandoned Hardrock Mines Act was signed into law. It requires the EPA to permit 15 pilot cleanup projects to be completed within seven years. The projects can be located on private, federal, or state land.
David Hockey, acting director of the EPA Office of Mountains, Deserts, and Plains, said the agency will review project applications starting this fall. He hopes to have the first projects under construction next year and all 15 in progress by summer 2028.
By the Numbers
$11 Billion: Army Corps infrastructure projects that will be “paused,” Russell Vought, the director of the White House budget office, wrote on X. Vought blamed the government shutdown for the freeze. The targeted projects are mostly in states where Democrats are in power, E&E News reports.
News Briefs
Potential Shutdown Staff Cuts Leading Democrats sent letters to the heads of EPA and Interior asking them to halt potential job cuts at their agencies during the shutdown.
Sen. Jeff Merkeley and Rep. Chellie Pingree are the ranking Democrats on the budget committees that oversee spending by those agencies.
Their concern is over the administration’s use of “reduction in force” during the shutdown to pare the federal workforce closer to President Trump’s vision of a diminished bureaucracy, even though Congress is supposed to set funding levels.
“This coordinated, government-wide approach to implementing RIFs during a lapse in appropriations appears designed to circumvent the appropriations process,” they wrote in their letter to Lee Zeldin, EPA administrator.
Of particular concern, they wrote, are proposed changes and reductions to the EPA’s science assessment and research division.
Similar concerns were raised in the letter to Doug Burgum, the interior secretary.
Studies and Reports
State Revolving Fund Audits The EPA Office of Inspector General reviewed the financial documents for the state revolving fund programs, the main federal vehicle for water infrastructure funding.
The review found that 42 state drinking water programs and 43 clean water programs had an independent financial audit.
Audited financial statements help to identify wasteful and fraudulent spending.
On the Radar
Shutdown Continues Nineteen days and counting, as of this writing.
The expansion would extend the mine’s life by 30 years and would entail construction of a 32-mile pipeline to supply 2,250 acre-feet of groundwater per year.
The mine is part of FAST-41, a federal program to accelerate project permitting and environmental reviews through close interagency coordination. The project dashboardsuggests that permitting for the Castle Mountain expansion will be completed by December 2026.
Public comments are being accepted through November 20. Submit them via the above link.
A virtual public meeting will be held on November 5 to outline the project and collect public input. Register here.
Federal Water Tap is a weekly digest spotting trends in U.S. government water policy. To get more water news, follow Circle of Blue on Twitter and sign up for our newsletter.
Scientists secure jute netting over mulch on a newly planted section of the Ophir Pass fen in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains. Anna Marija Helt/High Country News
The resinous scentof Engelmann spruce wafted over a shallow, mossy pool surrounded by lush sedges near the 11,800-foot summit of Ophir Pass, in southwestern Colorado’s rugged San Juan Mountains. This type of wetland, known as a fen, forms when perennial water saturates the ground, limiting plant decomposition and allowing organic matter to accumulate as peat.
Just downhill, however, on that hot, sunny July day, another part of the fen was visible: a degraded area, bare soil exposed on a steep slope.
Peatlands — fens and bogs — are key climate regulators. (Bogs are maintained by precipitation, but fens, which, in North America, occur in the Northeast, Midwest and Mountain West, depend on groundwater.) Their peat retains plant carbon that would otherwise decompose and be released as carbon dioxide. Despite covering only about 4% of Earth’s land area, peatlands store a third of the world’s soil carbon — twice the amount trapped in forest biomass. “Fens are old-growth wetlands,” said Delia Malone, a recently retired field ecologist with the Colorado Natural Heritage Program. Some of Colorado’s fens are over 10,000 years old.
In relatively dry southern Colorado, they also provide a secondary round of water storage. The first round is Colorado’s snowpack, which, as it melts, feeds groundwater that fens’ spongy peat captures and later releases to dwindling waterways and drying landscapes after the snow is gone.
But the steep and degraded bare patch at Ophir Pass no longer functions. Where sedges, mosses, bog birch and other wetland species should be thriving, white PVC groundwater testing wells dot the ground, and heavy straw tubes called wattles reduce water and sediment runoff into the creek below.
“This is the steepest peatland we’ve ever tried to restore, as far as I know,” said wetland ecologist Rod Chimner, a professor at Michigan Tech. In the Rockies, fens lie at high elevations, which complicates restoration. Approximately 2,000 fens have been mapped so far in the San Juans, and about 200 need work. Chimner’s Ph.D. advisor, David Cooper, began restoring the area’s fens decades ago, and together they’ve literally written the book on mountain peatland restoration. Now, Chimner and staff from Mountain Studies Institute (MSI) — a local nonprofit research and education center — are restoring an ecosystem born from the last ice age but damaged by bulldozing in the 1970s.
Dams, road-building and other human activities harm Colorado’s fens, which can take 1,000 years to build just 8 inches of peat soil. The Ophir Pass fen is a rare iron fen, fed by groundwater rendered acidic by iron pyrite. The resulting chemistry supports unique plant communities — and leaves iron and other minerals incorporated in the peat or deposited in hardened layers. This fen was likely damaged by bog iron mining, which has degraded several iron fens in the San Juans.
Wattles on a steep degraded section of the fen. Anna Maria Helt/High Country News
Lenka Doskocil examines roots in peat that could be centuries old. Anna Maria Helt/High Country News
A restored pool flanked by sedges. Anna Maria Helt/High Country News
CLOUDS STARTED TO BUILD as workers used hand saws to extract plugs of sedge and soil from a healthy, already restored part of the fen. Like Goldilocks’ bed, the plugs have to be just right: Too large or too many, and digging them up disturbs the soil surface; too small, and they won’t survive transplantation. “As long as it has at least one rhizome, it will plant and spread,” said Lenka Doskocil, a research associate with MSI’s Water Program and Chimner’s graduate student. She split a plug, revealing rhizomes embedded in the rusty-brown peat, then nestled it into a bucket of plugs. Sometimes, workers plant nursery plugs or greenhouse starts from seeds collected in the area.
Chimner and Doskocil hauled the first bucket of plugs up to the bare patch, began digging small, regularly spaced holes, then gently inserted one sedge plug per opening. A stiff breeze provided relief as several other people joined in. “Take your time and do it right,” Chimner said encouragingly as he stepped back to observe. Otherwise, the plugs wouldn’t take.
Doskocil spotted an older plug protruding from the soil. But it wasn’t from rushed planting: Frost heave, a freeze-thaw cycle that thrusts soil upwards, had kicked it out of the ground, she said, tucking it back in. Frost heave complicates planting and breaks rhizomes, preventing nearby plants from colonizing bare soil. But Chimner’s past research has yielded a solution: Team members insulated the surface around each newly transplanted sedge with Excelsior, a shredded aspen mulch tough enough to withstand several winters. “We’re giving them little down jackets,” Chimner said.
A rhythm of extract-portage-dig-plant-mulch ensued as the iron-painted ridge of Lookout Peak towered to the north. A passenger yelled “thank you” from a truck descending the pass. Doskocil broke open a handful of peat, revealing roots that were hundreds of years old, if not older.
Planting the steepest quarter acre here has been difficult, and a 2021 fire didn’t help. “We’re kind of starting all over again” in that section, Chimner explained. They’re experimenting with direct seeding, which is common in wetland restoration, but challenging at the high-elevation site. “I’ve seeded here three times,” said Haley Perez, a community science program assistant with MSI.
Conservation biologist Anthony Culpepper, associate director of MSI’s Forest Program, gestured uphill toward what used to be a bare “Mars slope.” He listed the challenges: timing, winds that blow seeds away, variable winter and monsoonal precipitation, a short growing season, a sunbaked slope and animals that eat the seeds. Still, over many seasons and with multiple collaborators — several federal agencies, San Juan National Forest, Purgatory Village Land, the National Forest Foundation, San Juan Citizens Alliance and others — they’ve made great progress. That former Mars slope is now covered with mat-forming, soil-stabilizing wetland plants, including rare species.
The fen is wetter from strategic placement of wattles and check dams, wooden slats that slow surface water flow so that it soaks into the ground instead of running straight downhill. In turn, more groundwater has enabled transplantation and spread of thousands of plants. Much of the fen is now green, with mosses and other vegetation colonizing on their own. “This is the first time I’ve seen arnica at the site,” said Culpepper, who also noted the lack of invasives, a promising sign.
MSI takes an adaptive approach to restoration: Research guides planning and execution, and outcomes are carefully monitored to guide future work. That’s important in a region and state where rising temperatures and declining snowpack are predicted to lower water tables, which could disrupt new peat formation and even promote peat decomposition, potentially shifting some fens from carbon storage to carbon release. “How do we get our systems to a spot where they’re resilient enough to withstand the challenges that are going to continue to come?” asked Doskocil. MSI and its collaborators are working on it — at Ophir Pass; at Burrows Fen, a new project north of Silverton; and elsewhere throughout the San Juans.
Fat raindrops landed as the group debated whether to secure the mulch with a layer of jute netting. A wind gust decided it; they added the netting and then, just as the sun returned, trooped uphill to their vehicles to head home. Someone asked Chimner if he was satisfied with the day. “When I can look down and see all green, I’ll be satisfied,” he replied.
Last week, Jeff Brigger, an executive with NV Energy, Nevada’s largest utility — and a Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary — told a gathering in Las Vegas that tech firms are asking the utility to supply up to 22,000 megawatts of electricity to support planned data centers.
That is an insanely enormous amount of generation capacity. It’s about two-and-a-half times NV Energy’s current peak demand of 9,000 MW, according to a Las Vegas Review-Journal story. It’s enough to power about 11 million homes. And it’s equivalent to the generating capacity of five Palo Verde generating stations, the nation’s largest nuclear power plant.
Brigger noted, correctly, that these are “unprecedented times” before going on to say that the utility is “excited to serve this load.” I bet they are. Not only does it mean selling a hell of a lot more of their product, but it will also require investing in new infrastructure in a massive way, for which they can then recover the costs, with a profit, from all of their ratepayers. Warren Buffet’s about to get even richer — so long as power line-sparked wildfires don’t drain his utilities of all their cash.
To its credit, NV Energy has largely moved away from coal generation, shutting down its heavily polluting Reid Gardner plant near Moapa and replacing it with battery storage and solar. It is in the process of shutting down its North Valmy coal plant, too, but instead of tearing it down, the utility will convert it to run on natural gas, adding to its already substantial fleet of the fossil fuel-burning facilities. It’s likely that a portion of that requested 22,000 MW will come from new methane-fired plants.
But a great deal of the new capacity will also come from solar power. NV Energy is currently constructing the $4.2-billion Greenlink West transmission line between Las Vegas and Reno. And it is seeking Bureau of Land Management approval for its Greenlink North line that will run along Highway 50, also known as the Loneliest Road in America. These lines will open up hundreds of square miles of public land to utility-scale solar development, with most or all of the power going to data centers in the Reno and Las Vegas areas.
Proposed path of the Greenlink North transmission project. Credit: BLM
Look, I’d much rather see a solar or wind facility than a coal or natural gas plant. No matter how you figure it, the environmental and human health toll from burning fossil fuels is far greater than solar or wind power. A solar plant doesn’t spew sulfur dioxide and mercury and arsenic into the air (and bodies of those nearby); nor will it explode catastrophically, as a natural gas pipeline did this week in southern Wyoming, damaging a freight train and sending up flames visible from Colorado. Coal mining and natural gas extraction often occurs on public lands, damaging the ecosystem, fragmenting wildlife habitat, and polluting the water.
So it’s one thing when a new giant solar installation leads to a fossil fuel generator being retired. Yet the Big Data Center Buildup’s energy needs are so high that utilities end up deferring coal and gas plant retirements, building more gas plants, and carpeting public lands with solar. As the Center for Biological Diversity’s Patrick Donnelly put it in an email: “Turns out the destruction of the desert for renewable energy isn’t about displacing fossil fuels, it’s about feeding the big tech machine.”
Of course, at this point it’s anyone’s guess whether those solar and wind installations are ultimately built. While some are already under development in Nevada along the Greenlink West line, the Greenlink North line has yet to garner BLM approval. And since it is intended to carry primarily solar-generated electrons, it could face added scrutiny from the Trump administration. Meanwhile, Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” wiped out federal tax credits for solar and wind, making new developments less feasible.
It’s somewhat surprising that data centers continue to flock to the Las Vegas area given the water constraints. Nevada has butted up against the limits of its 300,000 acre-feet (down to 279,000 under current restrictions) Colorado River allotment for years. That has forced the Southern Nevada Water Authority to crack down on water consumption by banning new lawns, limiting pool sizes, and putting a moratorium on commercial and industrial evaporative cooling systems like those used by many data centers in arid regions.
As long as the moratorium stays in place — a Nevada lawmaker unsuccessfully tried to ban the ban this year — it will force new data centers in the Vegas-area to use less water-intensive, but more energy-intensive, cooling methods1. Still, the Las Vegas data centers that began operating prior to the 2023 ban use a lot of water: more than 716 million gallons, or about 2,200 acre-feet2, in 2024, according to Las Vegas Valley Water data obtained and reported by the Review-Journal.
It’s a bit overwhelming, especially since it all came on so fast. I looked back through the news and noticed that just five years ago talk about data centers’ energy and water use was confined to a few cryptocurrency miners setting up shop in rural Washington to take advantage of cheap hydropower. While the impact was big locally, it wasn’t yet throwing utilities’ long-term plans into disarray. But here we are.
In other data center news, the Doña Ana County commissioners voted 4-1 to approve tax incentives for Project Jupiter, a proposed $165 billion data center campus in Santa Teresa in the southeastern corner of New Mexico. Once again it’s a situation in which the community and region need the economic benefits and diversity the campus offered, but which is also short on water. As such, it sparked both opposition and support.
You may wonder why a place would try to lure, welcome, or even allow data centers into their communities, given their hefty resource consumption.
Sometimes they don’t: Tucson’s city council recently rejected a proposed data center after local residents raised concerns about water and power use and a lack of transparency. (The developers re-upped their proposal for a site outside the city, but opponents aren’t backing down).
The answer, as is often the case, is for the economic shot in the arm they offer. These sprawling facilities each create hundreds of construction jobs, which offer relatively high wages (even if they are short lived). Then they need employees to operate the centers (although not nearly as many). And they pay property taxes.
Right now, Las Vegas and Nevada as a whole seem to need a little help, given that they are one of the nation’s biggest victims of Trumponomics. Visitor volume to Las Vegas was down 11% in June and 12% in July compared to the same months in 2024, with hotel occupancy rates also taking a big hit. The state has lost 600 federal government jobs since Trump took office. And it has shed a whopping 7,300 construction jobs since January. Ouch.
On a similar note, Wyoming’s mining and logging sector shed about 1,000 jobs since January, a 6% drop. That’s surprising, given that this includes coal and uranium miners and oil and gas workers, who are supposed to be the main beneficiaries of Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda. Go figure.
🗺️ Messing with Maps 🧭
Here’s one more from the USGS’s Guidebook of the western United States: Part E – The Denver & Rio Grande Western route, published in 1922. This map shows a segment of the Wasatch Front in Utah. I’ve also included a Google Earth image of the same area now. It’s remarkable to me because back then Salt Lake City was a small city that stood on its own; now it’s surrounded by a sea of sprawl. Salt Lake was a bit bigger then (or rather, the lake level was higher than it was when the Google Earth image was made; when the map was made in 1909 it was 4,203 feet, now it’s about 13 feet lower). And Bingham Canyon still was a canyon, with little towns in it, rather than the gaping hole known as the Bingham Canyon copper mine.
For the most part, President Donald Trump has done everything we feared the candidate would do and then some: following Project 2025 to a T, gutting environmental and public health protections, shredding the First Amendment (to the point of even losing Tucker Carlson), threatening political opponents, and generally embracing authoritarianism.
But when it comes to public lands, there is actually one act we expected the administration to do shortly after the inauguration, but that it hasn’t yet attempted: Shrinking or eliminating national monuments, especially those designated during the Clinton, Obama, and Biden administrations. Even after Trump’s Justice Department opined (wrongly, I’d say) that the Antiquities Act authorizes a president to shrink or revoke national monuments, the administration didn’t actually do it.
I suspect this is because they realize how deeply unpopular that would be. Sure, Trump’s first-term shrinkage of Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments may have garnered some support from a handful of Utah right-wingers, but they’d be behind him regardless. Meanwhile, it pissed off a lot of Americans who value public lands but might otherwise support Trump’s policies.
That’s not to say the national monuments are safe. It’s just that the administration seems to be intent, for now, to outsource their destruction to their friends in Congress. The House Republicans’ proposed budget, for example, would zero out funding for GSENM’s new management plan — a de facto shrinkage.
And now, Rep. Paul Gosar, a MAGA Republican from Arizona, has introduced bills that would nullify Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni – Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument and the Ironwood Forest National Monument northwest of Tucson. The former blocks new mining claims in an area that has been targeted for uranium extraction. And the latter, established by Bill Clinton in 2000, covers a 189,713-acre swath of ecologically rich Sonoran Desert near the gaping wound known as the Asarco Silver Bell copper mine. The national monument designation blocked new mining claims.
Interestingly enough, neither of the national monuments are in Gosar’s district, which covers the heavily Republican western edge of the state, so he won’t suffer from voter blowback if the legislation succeeds.
⛏️ Mining Monitor ⛏️
Congressional Republicans, with some Democratic support, are again trying to pass legislation that would allow mining companies to dump their waste on public lands.
The Mining Regulatory Clarity Act of 2025, introduced by Rep. Mark Amodei, R-Nevada, made it through the House Natural Resources Committee this week on a 25-17 vote. It would tweak the 1872 Mining Law to ensure that mining companies can store tailings and other mining-related waste on public land mining claims that aren’t valid, meaning the claimant has not proven that the parcels contain valuable minerals. This was actually the norm for decades until 2022, when a federal judge ruled that the proposed Rosemont copper mine in Arizona could not store its tailings and waste rock on public land. That ruling was followed by a similar one in 2023, leading mining state politicians from both parties to try to restore the pre-Rosemont Decision rules.
The bill would supplement Trump’s executive order from March invoking the Defense Production Act to expedite mining on public lands, and his “emergency” order that fast-tracks mining and energy permitting on public lands.
***
Photo credit: Jonathan P. Thompson/The Land Desk
IsoEnergy, the company that owns the controversial Daneros Mine just outside Bears Ears National Monument and the Tony M Mine,plans to begin exploratory drilling at its Flatiron claims in Utah’s Henry Mountain uranium district. Last year, the Canada-based company staked a whopping 370 lode claims on federal land. Along with two Utah state leases, this adds up to about 8,800 acres south-southwest of Mt. Hillers.
🛢️ Hydrocarbon Hoedown
A peer-reviewed study out of UCLA recently found that pregnant women living near the Aliso Canyon natural gas storage facility in Los Angeles during the sustained blowout of 2015 experienced more adverse birth outcomes than expected. Specifically, the prevalence of low birthweight was 45% to 100% higher than those living outside the affected area. This should concern not only folks living near Aliso Canyon (which is still operational), but also anyone who lives near an oil and gas well or other facility.
Aliso Canyon is a depleted oil field in the hills of the Santa Susana Mountains in northern LA. Southern California Gas pipes in natural gas, pumps it into the oil field, and stores up to 84 billion cubic feet of the fuel there. In October 2015, one of the wells blew out and for the next 112 days spewed a total of about 109,000 metric tons of methane, a potent greenhouse gas and the main ingredient of natural gas.
That’s bad. But also mixed into the toxic soup that erupted from the field were other compounds such as mercaptans including tetrahydrothiophene and t-butyl mercaptan, sulfides, n-hexane, styrene, toluene, and benzene. All really nasty stuff that you don’t want in your air, and that is often emitted by oil and gas wells. The authors write:
“The emissions of BTEX and other HAP compounds are of particular concern as even at levels below health benchmarks they have been linked to health effects, including neurological, respiratory, and developmental effects.”
That appears to have been the case with the Aliso Canyon blowout, where “low birth weight and term low birth weight was higher than expected among women living in the affected area whose late pregnancy overlapped with the disaster.”
It’s simply more confirmation that fossil fuel development and consumption can take a big toll on the environment, the climate, and the people who live in or near the oil and gas patch or associated infrastructure. And that limits on methane emissions are important, even if you don’t care about climate change.
***
Long-time Land Desk readers might remember my story about the Horseshoe Gallup oil and gas field and sacrifice zone in northwestern New Mexico. I wrote about how the area had been ravaged by years of drilling and largely unfettered development, how the wells had been sold or handed off to increasingly irresponsible and slipshod companies as they were depleted, and how that had left dozens of abandoned facilities, oozing and seeping nasty stuff, but were not cleaned up because state and federal regulators still considered them to be “active.”
The field is still there, along with most of the abandoned wells. But Capital & Main’s Jerry Redfern reports that some of the worst sites, including the NE Hogback 53, are being cleaned up. Well, sort of. The extensive reclamation of the well and the tank battery was started, only to be halted in May at the end of the state’s fiscal year. It resumed in July, and is expected to cost about $650,000.
This highlights the need for stronger enforcement and, most importantly, adequate reclamation bond requirements. At prices like that, cleaning up just the Horseshoe Gallup could cost tens of millions of dollars, and the taxpayer will be left to shoulder most of the bill.
🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫
Clarification: In Tuesday’s dispatch on the Colorado River and Lake Powell, I wrote that another dry winter would put “… the elevation of Lake Powell at 3,500 feet by this time next year. And, due to the infrastructure’s limitations, Glen Canyon Dam would have to be operated as a ‘run of the river’ facility.” That probably needs a bit more explanation.
One smart reader pointed out that even after the surface level of Lake Powell drops below minimum power pool, or 3,490 feet in elevation, the dam can still release up to 15,000 cfs from its river outlets. Technically, managers would not be forced to go to run of the river until the surface level dropped below 3,370 feet, which is known as “dead pool.”
However, the Bureau of Reclamation is very wary of relying on the river outlets, because they weren’t designed for long-term use and could fail under those circumstances. So, BoR is intent on keeping the water levels above minimum power pool so that all releases can go through the penstocks and the hydroelectric turbines. “In effect,” the authors of the paper wrote, “at least for the short term, the engineering and safety issues associated with the ability to release water through Glen Canyon Dam mean that the amount of water actually available for release from Lake Powell is only that which exists above elevation 3500 feet.”
So, as long as this is the case, the BoR will need to go to run of the river as soon as the elevation drops to 3,500 feet. I hope that helps clear things up!
🗺️ Messing with Maps 🧭
Today’s map is less about the map than it is about the publication it comes from, the USGS’s Guidebook of the Western United States Part E. the Denver & Rio Grande Western Route, published in 1922. This thing is super cool, and super detailed (it’s 384 pages long). It’s got some great photos and maps, like this one (click on the image to see it in larger size on the website).
Besides having a cool, hand drawn style, this map struck me because it was made prior to the reservoirs on the Gunnison River. And it shows how the railroad tracks used to go into the Black Canyon at Cimarron and continue along the river all the way to Gunnison (most of that section is now under water). I suppose I should have known that was where the tracks went, but it never really occurred to me before. Credit: USGS
Related to that map were these two photos illustrating the miracle of irrigation.
It’s not a surprise, but it’s a bit disappointing and maddening nonetheless: Trump and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum have officially moved to rescind the Biden-era Public Lands rule that aimed to put conservation on a par with other uses on federal land, such as energy development, grazing, mining, and recreation.
For a quick review, the main provisions of the rule are:
It directs the agency to prioritize landscape health in all decision making;
It creates a mechanism for outside entities (tribes, states, nonprofits) to lease public land for restoration projects, and allows firms to lease land for mitigation work to offset impacts from development elsewhere;
It clarifies the process for designating areas of critical environmental concern, or ACECs, where land managers can add extra regulations to protect cultural or natural resources.
And it directs the agency to incorporate Indigenous knowledge into decision-making, particularly when considering ACECs.
The rule was hailed by some conservationists as a “generation-defining shift” in public land management, and lambasted by Sagebrush Rebel-wannabes as a “misguided land grab meant to prevent oil and gas production … <and> … an attack on our ranchers and farmers that will end grazing on federal lands and will also prevent Coloradans from accessing their public lands.”
I would say it is neither of those things, and did and would do little if anything to block drilling or grazing, and certainly hasn’t stopped anyone from accessing public lands. After all, it’s been in effect for over a year, and I certainly haven’t heard of anyone taking any significant actions under it, and I bet Burgum hasn’t either. In the end, the rule is essentially a reminder to the BLM that their job is not just to bend over for corporate and extractive interests, but to actually care for the land that belongs to all Americans. It is simply reinforcing the multiple-use charge Congress set forth when it passed the Federal Lands Policy and Management Act back in 1976.
But Burgum’s and the Trump administration’s entire raison d’etre a la public land policy is to bend over for corporate and extractive interests, so I guess they’ve got to throw this rule out along with all of the other environmental protections.
📈 Data Dump 📊
By this time of year most hay farmers have had multiple cuttings, have scrambled to get the hay baled and bucked and under cover before the monsoon hits, and maybe sold a bunch. So I figured it was a good time to check in and see how hay exports are doing this year. The answer: Not so hot, at least compared to other years.
There are various reasons for this — exports from Colorado River Basin states, especially California, have been falling for the last couple of years, perhaps in part because some farmers are being paid to stop irrigating, which cuts into overall production. But Trump’s tariffs — and the retaliatory tariffs our trading partners hit back with — are certainly having an effect.
If you’ve wondered where your state’s hay is going and how much it’s worth, we’ve got the answer in this series of charts. I just included Colorado River states, and left out New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming because exports were negligible. Keep in mind that these figures are thousands of U.S. dollars, meaning that in 2022, for example, California exported just over $200 million worth of hay to China, alone. Also, this is for all types of hay, including alfalfa. But most exported hay goes to dairy cattle, and so is mostly alfalfa. And, finally, the scales are different for each state. California exports far more hay than anyone else.
On the tragic occasion of the tragic assassination of Charlie Kirk, the right-wing commentator, I point you to a piece I wrote last year after the attempt on then-candidate Donald Trump’s life. (Kirk was killed in Utah and lived in Arizona, making this a sort of Western story). The situation, the rhetoric, the players, and the reaction are so similar that to write about it again would be just to repeat myself. So here it is, removed from behind the paywall so even you free-riders can take a gander (but maybe you’ll consider upgrading to paid so you can see ALL the archives all the time!).
Oak Flat, Arizona features groves of Emory oak trees, canyons, and springs. This is sacred land for the San Carlos Apache tribe. Resolution Copper (Rio Tinto subsidiary) lobbied politicians to deliver this National Forest land to the company with the intent to build a destructive copper mine. By SinaguaWiki – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=98967960
Click the link to read the article on the AZCentral website (Debra Utacia Krol). Here’s an excerpt:
August 20, 2025
Key Points
Hours after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals blocked a land swap for a copper mine at Oak Flat, President Donald Trump called the mine’s critics “Anti-American.”
Tribal leaders reacted quickly, reminding the president that they are the first Americans and are trying to protect their sacred lands.
Trump reportedly met with mining executives at the White House and, in his Truth Social post, argued that the United States needed to protect its copper reserves.
Arizona tribal leaders struck back after President Donald Trump called opponents of a planned copper mine at Oak Flat “anti-American,” suggesting they were allied with other copper-producing countries like China. Trump posted comments on Truth Social on Aug. 19, hours after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals temporarily halted a land exchange that would allow Resolution Copper to build the mine on a site east of Phoenix held sacred by the Apache people and other Indigenous communities. “Those that fought (the mine) are Anti-American, and representing other Copper competitive Countries,” Trump wrote, while claiming that the 9th Circuit Court is “a Radical Left Court.” He did not include any evidence to support his claims…Currently, 10 of the judges on the 9th Circuit’s panel are Trump appointees; another three are Republican-appointed justices, while the remaining 16 judges in the circuit court are Democratic appointees, according to the legal news outlet Daily Journal. The president also said the U.S. needs copper now…
In a Facebook post on Aug. 20, San Carlos Apache Tribe Chairman Terry Rambler hit back: “As first Americans, the San Carlos Apache Tribe agrees on the importance of protecting America’s interests,” he said, but “the President’s comments mirror misinformation that has been repeated by foreign mining interests that want to extract American copper.” Rambler also pointed out that a Chinese company, Chinalco, is the largest shareholder of Rio Tinto and BHP, the two British-Australian firms that jointly own Resolution Copper. “Of course their interest is in mining this copper and shipping it to China.” With just three smelters in the U.S., and one of those currently non-functional, mines have been shipping crushed ore to China for processing for years.
The San Carlos Apache Tribe and a coalition of environmental groups have fought for years against the Resolution Copper mine, which would become one of the country’s largest at the cost of a site revered by the tribe.
Just hours before the deal was set to go through, a federal appeals court temporarily blocked a land transfer in Arizona on Monday that would ultimately lead to the destruction of a site sacred to Western Apache people.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ temporary restraining order is the latest in a long-running saga in which the U.S. Forest Service has planned to transfer the land to a mining company, Resolution Copper, while the San Carlos Apache Tribe and a coalition of environmental groups have fought to protect the sacred site of Oak Flat, or Chí’chil Biłdagoteel in Apache.
The company has worked for two decades to gain access to the 2,200 acres of land in Tonto National Forest that contains both the sacred site and one of the world’s largest untapped copper deposits. The restraining order halts the land transfer until the court can rule on two consolidated cases, which have argued in lower courts that approval of the land transfer and mine violates the National Environmental Policy Act and failed to adequately consult with the tribe.
“The Apache people will never stop fighting for Chí’chil Biłdagoteel,” said San Carlos Apache Tribe Chairman Terry Rambler in a statement. “We thank the court for stopping this horrific land exchange and allowing us to argue the merits of our pending lawsuit in court.”
A spokesperson for Resolution Copper said in a written statement that the order is “merely a temporary pause so that the court of appeals can consider plaintiffs’ eleventh hour motions,” and that the company is “confident the court will ultimately affirm the district court’s well-reasoned orders explaining in detail why the congressionally directed land exchange satisfies all applicable legal requirements.”
U.S. District Judge Dominic W. Lanza on Friday denied the tribe and environmental groups’ challenges, which had cleared the way for the land transfer to go through. In his order, he acknowledged the mine would destroy the sacred area and use a massive amount of the region’s scarce groundwater. But he noted that the transfer was signed into law in 2014 by President Barack Obama—mandated by Congress in a rider attached to a defense bill—and that the Supreme Court declined to hear another case challenging the mine.
A spokesperson from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the Forest Service, declined to comment on the latest court order, but said the bill authorizing the land transfer aligns with the Trump administration’s efforts “to strengthen domestic mineral and energy production, advancing the nation’s economic and strategic goals.”
In April, the Trump administration signaled it would approve the project. A years-long religious freedom case brought by Apache Stronghold, an Apache religious group, was denied by the Supreme Court in May. Then, the U.S. Forest Service postedthe final environmental impact statement and draft record of decision for the Resolution Copper project, setting the stage for Oak Flat to be transferred to the mining company by Aug. 19.
Since then, the proposed mine has become one of the most high-profile environmental battles in the U.S. The 9th Circuit’s order requires the tribe and environmental groups to file their opening brief by Sept. 9, with answering briefs from the Forest Service and Resolution Copper due by Sept. 29.
“We’re thankful that the court has paused this ill-conceived land exchange that would destroy Oak Flat and all that makes it special, including the old Emory oak trees, endangered hedgehog cactus, and its significant cultural and recreational values,” said Sandy Bahr, director of the Sierra Club’s Grand Canyon Chapter, in a statement. The Sierra Club is one of the plaintiffs. “There is still a lot to do to save this special place, but we remain committed to doing everything we can to ensure Oak Flat is here for future generations.”
An aerial view of Oak Flat in Arizona. Credit: EcoFlight
Click the link to read the article on the AZCentral website (Debra Utacia Krol). Here’s an excerpt:
August 7, 2025
Key Points
The value of the copper beneath Oak Flat drew the attention of a judge hearing arguments to halt a land swap needed to build a huge mine.
The federal judge asked attorneys for Resolution Copper and the federal government what could stop the land exchange, which is required by law.
No timetable was given for a ruling in the case, but the land swap could occur as early as Aug. 19 if a court doesn’t block it.
U.S. District Court Judge Dominic W. Lanza heard arguments from the San Carlos Apache Tribe and a consortium of environmentalists on Aug. 6 as they seek to overturn a disputed land exchange between the U.S. Forest Service and Resolution Copper. Lanza likened the day’s “very complicated exercise” to pounding a square nail into a round hole. Much of the back-and-forth during the five-hour hearing centered around a 2022 appraisal of a 766-acre plot at Oak Flat, the Tonto National Forest campground at the heart of the struggle. Roger Flynn, who represented the environmentalists and inter tribal coalition, argued that the appraisal lacked one essential element: the value of the copper underneath the surface. Some estimates say that about 40 billion pounds of copper lie beneath Oak Flat, currently valued at $4.40 per pound…
Attorneys from the federal government and Resolution Copper, which has sought to obtain Oak Flat to mine for copper, squared off with lawyers from the Arizona Mining Reform Coalition and the San Carlos Apache Tribe, supported by the Inter Tribal Association of Arizona and several environmental organizations, including the Center for Biological Diversity and the Grand Canyon Chapter of the Sierra Club. Although there was no set date for Lanza to rule, he said he was cognizant of the need to rule soon as a 60-day review period nears an end. If no judge intervenes, the land exchange could be finalized as soon as Aug. 19.
Oak Flat, Arizona features groves of Emory oak trees, canyons, and springs. This is sacred land for the San Carlos Apache tribe. Resolution Copper (Rio Tinto subsidiary) lobbied politicians to deliver this National Forest land to the company with the intent to build a destructive copper mine. By SinaguaWiki – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=98967960
Click the link to read the article on the AZCentral website (Debra Utacia Krol). Here’s an excerpt:
July 29, 2025
Key Points
A group of Apache women has asked a court to stop a land exchange that would lead to a huge copper mine at Oak Flat.
The suit is the latest attempt to block Resolution Copper from building the mine on land east of Phoenix considered sacred to the Apache and other tribes.
A judge will hear arguments in a separate lawsuit next week as the date nears for the land swap to take place.
A group of Apache women asked a federal judge in Washington, D.C., to halt a disputed land exchange at the center of a long battle over plans to build a huge copper mine at Oak Flat. It’s the fourth lawsuit that seeks to stop the U.S. Forest Service from signing over title to the site, held sacred by Apache peoples and culturally significant by other tribes, to Resolution Copper in exchange for other plots of environmentally sensitive land in Arizona. The four women, who all have spiritual and cultural connections to the 2,200-acre campground in Tonto National Forest about 60 miles east of Phoenix, filed their suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia July 24. Nelson Mullins, a law firm based in Washington, D.C., and South Carolina, outlined the case, which asks Judge Timothy J. Kelly, an appointee of President Donald Trump, to stop the exchange until the plaintiffs can have their day in court. The suit claims the exchange violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the plaintiffs’ First Amendment-guaranteed religious rights protections and two environmental laws.
Visualizing Subsidence Through Block Cave Mining — Resolution Copper
dOak Flat, Arizona features groves of Emory oak trees, canyons, and springs. This is sacred land for the San Carlos Apache tribe. Resolution Copper (Rio Tinto subsidiary) lobbied politicians to deliver this National Forest land to the company with the intent to build a destructive copper mine. By SinaguaWiki – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=98967960
Click the link to read the article on the AZCentral website (Debra Utacia Krol). Here’s an excerpt:
May 15, 2025
Key Points
The San Carlos Apache Tribe wants a federal court to delay a land swap that would allow construction of a copper mine at Oak Flat.
A federal judge ordered a halt to the deal last week after hearing arguments by the grass roots group Apache Stronghold.
The San Carlos Apache Tribe has asked a federal court to block the Trump administration from finalizing a land exchange at Oak Flat Campground, following on the heels of a successful bid by grassroots group Apache Stronghold. The tribe sued to stop the exchange in 2021 after the U.S. Forest Service issued its final environmental impact statement. That opened a 60-day window during which the government could have finalized a deal with copper mining corporation Resolution Copper to take ownership of the site and begin construction on a huge copper mine that would eventually obliterate Oak Flat. San Carlos asked the U.S. District Court on May 14 to stop any progress on a plan that would allow Resolution to take ownership of Oak Flat and begin extracting copper on land considered sacred to Apache and other Native peoples. The tribe wants the order to stand until its own litigation was concluded…
“The Trump Administration is once again planning to violate federal laws and illegally transfer Oak Flat to the two largest foreign mining companies in the world,” said San Carlos Apache Tribe Chairman Terry Rambler. “Oak Flat sits above one of the largest copper deposits in the world. Resolution Copper intends to export the copper while destroying Apache sacred lands that the federal government has a Trust responsibility to protect. We will not allow this to happen.”
U.S. District Judge Steven V. Logan has already ordered a halt to the land swap in an order May 9 that ordered the Forest Service to hold off on issuing the document until one day after the Supreme Court had either refused to take the case of after it had decided in the government’s favor…The struggle over a small plot of land in the mountains is also at the heart of an ongoing national debate about the conflict between First Amendment religious rights, public lands oversight and a 150-year-old mining law’s relevance in the 21st century. [ed. emphasis mine]
In this detailed computer animation, we take a look into the future of Oak Flat, meticulously illustrating the development of subsidence as a result of the block cave mining process over an extensive period of 40 to 50 years. Crafted with transparency and precision, this video is grounded in the findings of multiple technical studies, aiming to provide as realistic a projection as possible of the landscape changes that Oak Flat will undergo. Block cave mining, a method known for its efficiency and low cost, has significant impacts on the terrain above the extraction zone. Through state-of-the-art animation, viewers will gain an understanding of how and why these changes occur, presenting a clear picture of the subsidence process from start to finish. Join us as we explore the intricacies of block cave mining and its effects on Oak Flat, guided by the latest in animation technology and scientific research. Whether you’re a student, a professional in the field, or simply interested in the future of our landscapes, this video is an invaluable resource for grasping the challenges and considerations of modern mining practices. By offering a visual journey through time, we aim to foster a comprehensive understanding of the complexities involved in mining operations and their environmental impacts. Learn more at http://www.resolutioncopper.com
It appears that Republicans are actually serious about taking America’s public lands out of the public’s hands.
During a late night-early morning move this week, Republican Reps. Mark Amodei of Nevada and Celeste Maloy of Utah sneakily added an amendment to the House reconciliation bill that would open the door to selling off thousands of acres of Bureau of Land Management parcels (and some U.S. Forest Service land) in Utah and Nevada. Revenues would be used to help offset proposed tax cuts for the wealthy. The bill passed through committee, despite strong opposition from Democrats, but has not been voted on by the whole House yet.
The amendment will serve as an important test for Republicans who have condemned or remained ambivalent about public land transfers in the past. Rep. Ryan Zinke, the Montana Republican and Interior Secretary under Trump I, has said public land sales are his “red line” he refuses to cross, which makes sense since his constituents — and the general public — tend to be opposed to this sort of transfer1. We’ll see. The question is whether the GOP’s urge to pass a “big, beautiful bill” for Trump will erase that line for him and others. And if the amendment does pass, it may break the seal, so to speak, and open the door to much larger land transfers.
The whole deal has been wrapped in confusion, due to the rush of adding the amendment and lack of transparency around it, along with its vague language, which points to parcels on maps that are also a bit unclear. But it appears that it includes about 11,000 acres of BLM land in Utah and 200,000 acres or more in Nevada.
At least some of the land earmarked for “disposal” (bureaucratese for selling, giving away, or transferring public land) ostensibly would be used for housing. The amendment specifies that parcels in southern Nevada and in Washoe County be made “available at less than fair market value for affordable housing.” And parcels marked for disposal near Mesquite and Mormon Mesa in Nevada overlap with the American Enterprise Institute’s target areas for its Homesteading 2.0 and Freedom Cities initiatives. The Utah land is all in Washington and Beaver counties, the former of which is one of the nation’s fastest growing areas. The land is all on the urban fringe, meaning developing it would lead to more sprawl.
The Great Basin Water Network notes that some of the Washington County parcels also follow the path of the proposed $2 billion Lake Powell Pipeline, which would pull up to 28 billion gallons of water from the reservoir, use huge amounts of power to pump it across 141 miles of mesas and valleys to southwestern Utah, where it would water lawns and golf courses and irrigate alfalfa. Other parcels are long skinny segments that follow roads.
While some news reports and environmental groups have suggested that the proposed transfer is aimed at facilitating oil and gas drilling, it’s highly unlikely, as none of the parcels are in oil and gas-rich areas.
I did a mashup of the various maps for the Washington County, Utah, parcels, with the maroon and fuchsia indicating transfers requested by Washington County and St. George, and the dark blue by the water conservancy district. (To see a larger version click on it and go to the Land Desk website).
The fuchsia parcels were apparently requested by Washington County, and include the proposed path of the Lake Powell pipeline as well as what look to be parcels intended for housing or commercial development, including one on the border of Zion National Park.
The pink indicates BLM parcels that would be disposed of under the amendment and total about 65,000 acres. If the land were transferred, it would allow for a major expansion of Searchlight, a small former mining town, and Mesquite. It would provide enough acreage for a whole new sprawling city in the Moapa Valley.
🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫
There’s really no avoiding it now: This year’s spring runoff is going to be pretty piddly (in some cases this is in the past tense, since peak runoff has already come and gone). The winter started out pretty strong, and for some areas continued to be average into early spring, but then it all went to hell in a handbasket, despite early May storms.
Hopes for a continued recovery of Lake Powell levels this year are pretty much dashed. The Bureau of Reclamation’s latest 2025 water year unregulated inflow forecast for the reservoir is a meagre 6.78 million acre-feet, or 71% of normal. That would mean Lake Powell will continue to shrink over the next 12 months.
📸 Parting Shot 🎞️
I browse through old newspapers quite often to research the history of things. And lately, when I was looking into wolves in Colorado and Utah, I stumbled across a bunch of ads with a similar theme. And I couldn’t help but be reminded of some of the crazy spam that clogs up my email and social media feeds. These are from the late 1800s and early 1900s, and here merely for your amusement.
1 Let’s just be clear about something here: Zinke and others may express opposition to full-on land transfers, but they strongly support de facto land transfers, i.e. oil and gas and coal leases and mining claims. While they don’t transfer title of the land to the lessee or claimant, they do transfer the American public’s minerals and hydrocarbons to the corporations for little or no cost. And access can be cut off from the land while it’s being drilled or mined, and those activities can not only wreck the land, but also preclude future uses even after mining and drilling has ceased.
Oak Flat, Arizona features groves of Emory oak trees, canyons, and springs. This is sacred land for the San Carlos Apache tribe. Resolution Copper (Rio Tinto subsidiary) lobbied politicians to deliver this National Forest land to the company with the intent to build a destructive copper mine. By SinaguaWiki – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=98967960
Click the link to read the article on the AZCentral.com website (Debra Utacia Krol). Here’s an excerpt:
May 9, 2024
Key Points
A federal judge temporarily blocked a procedural move that would allow a land exchange for a copper mine at Oak Flat, east of Phoenix.
The ruling was issued two days after lawyers for both sides argued the case in a Phoenix courtroom and will stand until the U.S. Supreme Court acts.
Judge Steven P. Logan issued the order May 9, two days after hearing the case in U.S. District Court in Phoenix. He ruled that the government cannot publish a final environmental review of a land swap between Resolution and the U.S. Forest Service, which manages a campground at the site 60 miles east of Phoenix. The order would remain in place until the day after the U.S. Supreme Court declines to take the case or, if it accepts it, rules against grassroots group Apache Stronghold, which filed a lawsuit to stop the exchange in 2021 and sought the temporary delay in the Phoenix court…
In his decision, Logan wrote that it was “abundantly clear that the balance of equities ‘tips sharply’ in Plaintiff’s favor, and that even in the short term, they have established a likelihood of irreparable harm should the transfer proceed.” If the government reissued the environmental impact statement, the land swap could occur within 60 days.
The “Bonita Peak Mining District” superfund site. Map via the Environmental Protection Agency
Click the link to read the article on The Durango Herald website (Reuben M. Schafir) Here’s an excerpt:
April 29, 2025
The Bureau of Land Management is restoring up to 11 cubic feet per second of water previously diverted to the Uncompahgre River Basin back to the headwaters of the Animas River north of Silverton. That’s a win for fish, other aquatic wildlife and mining remediation, said Trout Unlimited’s Mining Coordinator Ty Churchwell, because the water will dilute heavy metals to less toxic concentrations. Both the national organization of Trout Unlimited and the local Five Rivers chapter provided financial assistance with the acquisition. The 11-cubic-foot diversion is about 10% of the river’s total current flows in Silverton before the confluence with Cement Creek…
The previous owner held the rights to divert the water through the Mineral Point Ditch – before it entered Burrows Creek – over into the Uncompahgre Basin for agricultural use. This resulted in a 100% depletion of that water from the Animas River…The BLM paid $297,000 – fair market value – to buy the water right from a willing seller, agency spokeswoman Katie Palubicki said in an email to The Durango Herald, using funding from the Land and Water Conservation Fund and the agency’s Abandoned Mine Lands program to acquire the right.
Oak Flat, Arizona features groves of Emory oak trees, canyons, and springs. This is sacred land for the San Carlos Apache tribe. Resolution Copper (Rio Tinto subsidiary) lobbied politicians to deliver this National Forest land to the company with the intent to build a destructive copper mine. By SinaguaWiki – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=98967960
Click the link to read the article on the AZCentral.com website (Debra Utacia Krol). Here’s an excerpt:
April 18, 2025
Key Points
The Trump administration put Resolution Copper’s proposed mine at Oak Flat on a priority list with nine other mining projects, declaring they were vital to the nation’s security.
A day earlier, the administration announced it would re-issue an environmental impact statement required to finish a land swap that would allow the mine’s construction.
Tribes and environmentalists say Trump has clearly decided not to wait for court rulings on the project, putting the sacred site in greater jeopardy.
The Trump administration has now put the Oak Flat copper mine on the fast track for permit approval, a day after moving to push ahead with a land swap. A federal agency that oversees and supports permits for public lands projects added Resolution Copper‘s proposed mine east of Phoenix to a new priority list on April 18, along with nine other mining projects. It is part of the administration’s push to increase domestic production of critical minerals through an executive order issued March 20. The list was posted in the wake of an announcement by the U.S. government on April 17 that it would reissue the final environmental impact statement, clearing the way to transfer ownership of Oak Flat, a site considered sacred to Apache and other Native peoples, to Resolution Copper no earlier than June 17…
A petition attempting to stop the land swap is awaiting action at the U.S. Supreme Court. It was filed by grassroots group Apache Stronghold as part of ongoing litigation to stop the mine from turning Oak Flat into a huge crater through its mining process. The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which is representing Apache Stronghold, filed a letter April 18 with the Supreme Court calling for the high court to move quickly to accept Apache Stronghold’s case…The latest order put Oak Flat and nine other mining projects — including the McDermitt and Silver Peak lithium mines in Nevada; the Stibnite open-pit gold mine in Idaho; and the Lisbon Valley copper mine in Utah — on a faster schedule.
The fate of Arizona’s proposed Resolution Copper mine rested with the federal courts, but the administration announced Thursday it would move to approve the project before their rulings.
The Trump administration on Wednesday signaled it intends to approve a land transfer that will allow a foreign company to mine a sacred Indigenous site in Arizona, where local tribes and environmentalists have fought the project for decades and before federal courts rule on lawsuits over the project.
Western Apache have gathered at Oak Flat, or Chi’chil Biłdagoteel in Apache, since time immemorial for sacred ceremonies that cannot be held anywhere else, as tribal beliefs are inextricably tied to the land. The tribe believes the landscape located outside present-day Superior, Arizona, is a direct corridor to the Creator, where Gaan—called spirit dancers in English, and akin to angels—reside. The site allows the Western Apache to connect to their religion, history, culture and environment, tribal members told Inside Climate News.
But beneath the ground at the site of Oak Flat lies one of the world’s largest untapped copper deposits. Resolution Copper, a subsidiary of two of the biggest mining companies in the world, Rio Tinto and BHP, has worked for decades to gain access to the location to utilize what’s called “block cave mining.”
The method, used to access low-grade ore, requires undermining the surface of the land so it collapses under its own weight to reveal the copper. At some point, the proposed mine would create an open pit 1.8 miles wide and 1,000 feet deep, big enough to fit the Eiffel Tower and nearly as large as the local town, according to environmental review documents for the project.
Three lawsuits against the project are still working their way through the courts. Apache Stronghold v. United States, decided by a federal appeals court in favor of the mine, was appealed by plaintiffs more than a year ago to the Supreme Court, which has not yet decided whether to take it up. That case argues the destruction of Oak Flat violates the Apache’s religious freedom, and is a threat to other religions.
The other two cases are awaiting the Supreme Court decision before they advance through the federal court system.
Environmentalists, local opponents and members of the San Carlos Apache Tribe lambasted the administration’s decision to move forward without a ruling from the court.
“The U.S. government is rushing to give away our spiritual home before the courts can even rule—just like it’s rushed to erase Native people for generations,” Wendsler Nosie Sr. of Apache Stronghold, the religious group leading the fight against the mine, and former chairman of the San Carlos Apache Tribe, said in a statement. “This is the same violent pattern we have seen for centuries. We urge the Supreme Court to protect our spiritual lifeblood and give our sacred site the same protection given to the holiest churches, mosques, and synagogues throughout this country.”
The Trump administration did not respond to a request for comment.
Thursday’s decision to move forward with the Resolution Copper mine is the latest in the Trump administration’s efforts to boost the U.S. domestic mining industry as part of its “energy dominance” agenda.
Already this year, President Donald Trump has signed an executive order to streamline the permitting of mines across the country and make mineral extraction the top use of public lands that hold needed minerals. All mining projects for copper, uranium, potash, gold and any critical mineral, element, compound or material identified by the chair of the new National Energy Dominance Council are included under the order. One public comment period regarding an exploration plan for a lithium mine was already drastically reduced, but a fierce pushback from the public prompted an extension.
Mine Will Bring “Devastation and Pollution,” Opponents Say
The news about the mine came in legal filings for the three court cases and on the U.S. Forest Service’s website for the project, which states that it intends to publish the final environmental impact statement and a draft decision for the land transfer and mine within 60 days.
The filing said that if the Supreme Court declines to hear the religious freedom case, federal authorities will move forward with approval of the project. If the court hears the case and rules against the federal approval, the government will reevaluate how to proceed, it says.
“The feds are barreling ahead to give Oak Flat to Resolution Copper, even as the Supreme Court considers whether to hear the case,” Luke Goodrich, vice president and senior counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which is representing Apache Stronghold in its case, said in a statement. “This makes the stakes crystal clear: if the Court doesn’t act now, Oak Flat could be transferred and destroyed before justice can be served.”
Minerals like copper are critical to everything from transmission lines to batteries for electric vehicles. And mines for such minerals can bring coveted jobs to rural regions. But they often destroy local lands and waters.
The federal government’s initial environmental impact statement for Resolution Copper’s mine concludes that the project will destroy sacred oak groves, sacred springs and burial sites, resulting in what “would be an indescribable hardship to those peoples.” It would also use as much water each year as the city of Tempe, home to Arizona State University and 185,000 people. It would pull water from the same tapped-out aquifer the Phoenix metro area relies on, where Arizona has prohibited any more extraction except for exempted uses like mines.
The proposed mine would also leave behind a 500-foot-tall pile of mine tailings filled with 1.5 billion tons of toxic waste that would have to be constantly maintained to prevent the contamination from spreading.
Though Superior town leaders have backed the mine, not every local is supportive of it. Henry Muñoz, a lifelong miner who worked at the town’s previous copper mine until it shut down and is now the chairman of the Concerned Citizens and Retired Miners Coalition, said the administration’s decision is premature but that “money talks in Washington.”
Henry Muñoz, a former miner and resident of Superior, Arizona, overlooks a portion of Oak Flat—part of Tonto National Forest and a sacred site for the San Carlos Apache. Credit: Wyatt Myskow/Inside Climate News
One of the National Mining Association’s top priorities has been moving the stalled project forward.
“Rio Tinto and BHP, they have billions and billions of dollars,” Muñoz said. “They couldn’t care less about the environment, about the health and safety of people. Money is the motivator.”
In a statement, Vicky Peacey, general manager at Resolution Copper, said the company was “encouraged to hear” the Forest Service was proceeding with the project.
“This world-class mining project has the potential to become one of the largest copper mines in America, adding up to $1 billion a year to Arizona’s economy and creating thousands of local jobs in a region of rural Arizona where mining has played an important role for more than a century,” she said. “A decade of feedback from local communities and Native American Tribes has shaped this project every step of the way, and we remain committed to maintaining an open dialogue to ensure the Resolution Copper project moves forward responsibly and sustainably as we transition into the next phase of the permitting process.”
All of the project’s impacts, Muñoz said, are out in the open, available for the public to read in the hundreds of pages of permitting documents. He likened Resolution Copper’s public messaging of the project to the Devil telling someone not to read the Bible, as it would change how they felt about him. In this case, he said, the public would realize the project is not in the best interest of Americans.
“They’re talking a 40-year mine life,” Muñoz said, questioning what will happen to Superior after that time. “We’re going to be like all the other former mining towns. We’re going to have that big old toxic toilet on the hill. We’re going to have that big waste dump, and then we’re going to end up wasting 250 billion gallons of water that was meant for the American taxpayer, for the benefit of two foreign mining companies. There’s nothing good for us in this project that I can see. Nothing but temporary jobs. But at the end, devastation and pollution.”
A Decades-Long Fight
Since the 1950s, Oak Flat has been under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Forest Service and listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Legislators for years pushed to have the land made available for mining via a land transfer, where a company typically offers up environmentally important land it owns in exchange for lands better suited for extraction but unavailable for development.
Each attempt failed until 2014, when the late Arizona Sen. John McCain and former Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake attached a last-minute rider to that year’s defense bill that required Oak Flat to be transferred to Resolution Copper. The transfer launched one of the country’s most controversial and high-profile environmental fights, with the San Carlos Apache and environmentalists fighting to stop the transfer and save the sacred land.
The land Resolution Copper would exchange for Oak Flat includes an old-growth mesquite forest located in southern Arizona’s San Pedro Valley, near the town of Mammoth. Although that 3,000-acre site is treasured by birders, critics of the transfer say the site is not enough to compensate for the loss of Oak Flat, which is also habitat for multiple species listed under the Endangered Species Act.
Outside the town of Mammoth, Arizona, is the site of a mesquite forest owned by the mining company Resolution Copper. The forest is the centerpiece of the company’s land exchange with the federal government to acquire land outside the town of Superior for a controversial mine that would destroy a sacred site for the Western Apache. Credit: Wyatt Myskow/Inside Climate News
Outside the town of Mammoth, Arizona, is the site of a mesquite forest owned by the mining company Resolution Copper. The forest is the centerpiece of the company’s land exchange with the federal government to acquire land outside the town of Superior for a controversial mine that would destroy a sacred site for the Western Apache. Credit: Wyatt Myskow/Inside Climate News
The two other lawsuits over the mine that will go through the court system after the Apache Stronghold case reaches its final resolution include one from the San Carlos Apache tribe itself that argues, under a treaty between the tribe and the U.S. government, the land still belongs to the Apache tribe.
The other lawsuit, filed by the Arizona Mining Reform Coalition, the Center for Biological Diversity, Earthworks, the Grand Canyon chapter of the Sierra Club and the Inter Tribal Association of Arizona, alleged the Forest Service failed to analyze and mitigate the proposed mine’s potential damage to the environment and failed to comply with multiple laws and regulations.
“Once we destroy this,” Muñoz asked of Oak Flat, “what do we have left?”
Oak Flat, Arizona features groves of Emory oak trees, canyons, and springs. This is sacred land for the San Carlos Apache tribe. Resolution Copper (Rio Tinto subsidiary) lobbied politicians to deliver this National Forest land to the company with the intent to build a destructive copper mine. By SinaguaWiki – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=98967960
Oak Flat, Arizona features groves of Emory oak trees, canyons, and springs. This is sacred land for the San Carlos Apache tribe. Resolution Copper (Rio Tinto subsidiary) lobbied politicians to deliver this National Forest land to the company with the intent to build a destructive copper mine. By SinaguaWiki – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=98967960
Click the link to read the article on the AZCentral.com website (Debra Utacia Krol). Here’s an excerpt:
April 17, 2025
Key Points
In a new court filing, the Trump administration says it will reissue an environmental impact statement that would allow the government to swap land with Resolution Copper at Oak Flat.
The land swap was put on hold during the Biden administration and the case has been working its way through the courts. The Supreme Court is still deliberating whether to hear the case.
Opponents say the court filing demonstrates that Trump doesn’t care about the land or the people who hold it sacred and only wants to hand Resolution Copper what it wants.
The Trump administration plans to reissue the final environmental impact statement for a long-delayed land swap that would hand over Oak Flat, a site considered sacred to Apache peoples and other Native peoples, to a copper mining company no earlier than June 17, according to a filing with the U.S. District Court of Arizona. The government issued the notice on April 17 even as the U.S. Supreme Court continues to deliberate over accepting a 4-year-old court case filed by grassroots group Apache Stronghold to prevent the 2,200-acre site from being obliterated by a copper mine. It’s the latest twist in a more than 20-year-old struggle over the fate of Oak Flat, between the Native communities who hold the site sacred and Resolution Copper, which wants access to one of the country’s remaining large copper deposits. For the leaders of the opposition, the court filing confirmed their worst fears.
“The U.S. government is rushing to give away our spiritual home before the courts can even rule — just like it’s rushed to erase Native people for generations,” said Apache Stronghold leader Wendsler Nosie. “This is the same violent pattern we have seen for centuries. We urge the Supreme Court to protect our spiritual lifeblood and give our sacred site the same protection given to the holiest churches, mosques, and synagogues throughout this country.”
[…]
Oak Flat, or Chi’chil Biłdagoteel, “the place where the Emory oak grows,” is at the heart of a dispute over what should happen to the land. In December 2014, Congress authorized the U.S. Forest Service to trade the 2,200-acre site, currently a campground about 60 miles east of Phoenix, for parcels of environmentally sensitive private land owned by Resolution Copper, a subsidiary of British-Australian mining companies Rio Tinto and BHP…To obtain the copper ore, Resolution would use a method known as block cave mining, in which tunnels are drilled beneath the ore body, and then collapsed, leaving the ore to be moved to a crushing facility. Eventually, the ground would subside, leaving behind a crater about 1,000 feet deep and nearly 2 miles across where Oak Flat and its religious and environmental significance stand.
In this detailed computer animation, we take a look into the future of Oak Flat, meticulously illustrating the development of subsidence as a result of the block cave mining process over an extensive period of 40 to 50 years. Crafted with transparency and precision, this video is grounded in the findings of multiple technical studies, aiming to provide as realistic a projection as possible of the landscape changes that Oak Flat will undergo. Block cave mining, a method known for its efficiency and low cost, has significant impacts on the terrain above the extraction zone. Through state-of-the-art animation, viewers will gain an understanding of how and why these changes occur, presenting a clear picture of the subsidence process from start to finish. Join us as we explore the intricacies of block cave mining and its effects on Oak Flat, guided by the latest in animation technology and scientific research. Whether you’re a student, a professional in the field, or simply interested in the future of our landscapes, this video is an invaluable resource for grasping the challenges and considerations of modern mining practices. By offering a visual journey through time, we aim to foster a comprehensive understanding of the complexities involved in mining operations and their environmental impacts. Learn more at http://www.resolutioncopper.com
Satellite image of a portion of the Morenci Mine in Arizona. Source: Google Earth.
Last week, President Trump signed an executive order — his 150th so far this term, by my rough count — invoking the Defense Production Act to expedite mining on federal lands. The wording of the order suggests that the aim is not just to cut through some of the red tape hindering proposed projects, but to incite the industry to mine areas that it may not have been considering previously.
The order has understandably alarmed public lands advocates, but it has also spawned some misconceptions, particularly concerning the 1872 General Mining Law.
Green River Basin oil shale deposits via the Bureau of Land Management
While Trump’s attacks on the nation and public lands have been of unprecedented scope and scale so far, his use of the Cold War-era DPA is not unprecedented or even all that unusual. The Carter administration used it to justify pouring billions of dollars of subsidies into “synfuel” production as part of its quest for “energy independence.” This sparked massive oil shale operations in western Colorado (which crashed spectacularly). And Biden used the Act to encourage mining for so called “green metals,” such as lithium, boron, and manganese. He also streamlined permitting for the proposed Hermosa manganese mine in southern Arizona, and loaned the contested Thacker Pass lithium mine in Nevada $2.6 billion.
But Trump’s order goes much further than Biden’s. He is expanding the list of target minerals to just about everything, including “critical minerals, uranium, copper, potash, gold, and any other element, compound or material as determined by the Chair of the National Energy Dominance Council, such as coal.” While Biden wanted a survey of the nation’s mineral production capacity, and promised to adhere to all existing environmental laws and consult with tribal nations, Trump is ordering his agencies to:
Compile a list of all proposed mining projects “in order to expedite the review of those projects in coordination with the National Energy Dominance Council.”
Amend or revise land use plans under the Federal Land Policy and Management Act as necessary to “support the intent of this order.”
“Identify as many sites as possible that might be suitable for mineral production activities that can be permitted as soon as possible.”
Prioritize mineral production activities over other types of activities on federal lands.
Provide financing, loans, and investment for new mines, including from a “dedicated critical minerals fund established through the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation.”
“New recommendations will be provided to Congress regarding treatment of waste rock, tailings, and mine waste disposal under the Mining Act of 1872.”
Instead of adhering to environmental laws, Trump would simply alter them to support mining. He not only wants to help out proposed projects with regulatory and financial subsidies, but also wants to spur on new projects on “as many sites as possible.” And he is prioritizing mineral extraction over all other activities on federal lands, a blatant violation of the Federal Land Policy Management Act’s multiple-use mandate.
That would mean not only that mining would take precedence over conservation and recreation, but also livestock grazing and other extractive uses. The OHV crowd that’s worried about the BLM closing a few roads to motorized vehicles around Moab might just find themselves ousted from a lot more areas by potash ponds, uranium mines, or lithium operations.
Trump’s recommendations to Congress likely will be to tweak the 1872 Mining Law to ensure that mining companies can store waste on public land mining claims that aren’t valid, meaning that they have not proven that the parcels contain valuable minerals. This was actually the norm for decades until 2022, when a federal judge ruled that the proposed Rosemont copper mine in Arizona could not store its tailings and waste rock on public land. That ruling was followed by a similar one in 2023, leading mining state politicians from both parties to try to restore the pre-Rosemont Decision rules.
It’s around the General Mining Law that misconceptions have arisen. The folks at More Than Just Parks say the new order “doesn’t create a new legal framework. It exhumes an old one — a fossil from the 19th century … It’s the Mining Act of 1872, back from the dead, and now wearing body armor.” Which is a nice way to put it, but the Mining Act never died, so this order can’t revive it.
The other misconception appeared in Lands Lost, another great Substack focusing on public lands, which wrote: “… there are no meaningful environmental safeguards in place because public land mining is a free-for-all governed only by an 1872 law that’s never been modernized.”
It’s true that the 1872 Mining Law is inadequate, allows mining companies or individuals to stake a claim to any public land without public input or environmental review, conduct exploratory work with a minimum of review, and pay no royalties on hardrock minerals they extract. However, the federal agencies do have additional regulations governing mining. Before a company can do any actual mining, it must get an operating permit from the Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Forest Service, or Department of Energy (depending on the land’s jurisdiction), which includes an environmental review (either an EA or a more extensive EIS, depending on the scope of the project). A mine may also need a Clean Water Act permit for any water discharges, including draining adits, and many states require additional permits as well.
By ordering the agencies to alter the FLPMA land-use plans to accommodate mining, Trump is essentially doing away with these additional safeguards, which really is scary. That would take us back to a time when the 1872 Mining Law was the only federal regulatory framework, which would give mining companies a free rein to trash public lands. However, Trump can’t do much about state requirements, except to try to bully them out of existence. [ed. emphasis mine]
The order applies only to federal lands, so mining projects that are on patented mining claims — which are entirely on private — would not be affected (although they might be eligible for the government handouts).
Proposed projects this fast-tracking could affect include:
Copper World Complex née Rosemont Mine in the Santa Rita Mountains south of Tucson, Arizona. After a judge kiboshed Canada-based Hudbay’s plan to dump mine waste on U.S. Forest Service land, the firm decided to base the initial phase on patented, i.e. private, mining claims and later expand to public lands.
South32’s proposed Hermosa Mine in the Patagonia Mountains of southern Arizona. Biden already fast-tracked permitting for this battery-grade manganese mine, but Trump’s order could speed it along even more.
Energy Fuels’ Roca Honda uranium mine and Laramide Resources’ La Jara Mesa uranium project, both on Forest Service land near Grants, New Mexico.
Anson/A1’s proposed lithium extraction projects and American Potash’s lithium and potash projects on BLM land east and north of Moab and south of Green River, Utah.
Lithium, copper, and uranium projects on BLM land in the Lisbon Valley in southeastern Utah.
Numerous proposed uranium mining projects on Energy Department leases and BLM land in the Uravan Mineral Belt in western Colorado.
Atomic Minerals’ uranium prospects on Harts Point, just outside the boundaries of Bears Ears National Monument.
Metallic Minerals is only doing exploratory drilling on its mining claims in the La Plata Mountains of southwestern Colorado, and have yet to make any mining plans public, so it’s not clear whether Trump’s order would affect this contested project.
Those links up ^^ there? A lot of them are to paywalled Land Desk archives. Break down the paywall and support oligarch-free journalism by becoming a paid subscriber now.
Satellite image of Phoenix-area sprawl and adjacent BLM land. Source: Google Earth.
🌵 Public Lands 🌲
Also last week, in a short-on-details Wall Street Journal opinion piece, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner unveiled a plan to transfer or lease “underused” public lands to states or localities for affordable housing. An Interior official then told Bloomberg Law’s Bobby Magill that the Bureau of Land Management is considering selling about 400,000 acres of federal land within 10 miles of cities and towns with more than 5,000 people for housing development.
This isn’t surprising: Republicans and Democrats have both been itching to grab some public land for housing for a while. And the stated intent, to add affordable housing to increasingly unaffordable public lands-gateway communities, is noble.
And yet, the plan — as scant in particulars as it is — is still riddled with problems.
Burgum has made it clear that he distinguishes between “special” and “our most beautiful” public lands, i.e. those that are in national parks or national monuments, and the remaining “underused,” “inhospitable or unoccupied” lands. The lands on the urban fringes he intends to take out of the American public’s hands belong to the latter category, apparently.
But those same lands are valuable, especially to the nearby communities. They provide an easy-to-access refuge — for humans and wildlife — from the urban din, as well as recreational opportunities. In fact, the close proximity of these public lands makes the communities more desirable and therefore more expensive: think Animas Mountain in Durango, the Slickrock Trail in Moab, Jumbo Mountain in Paonia, the Lunch Loop trails in Grand Junction, the Buckeye Hills near Phoenix, or the Juniper Woodlands trails outside Bend. Now imagine them covered in houses.
Because BLM lands are almost always outside the urban boundaries, developing them will lead directly to sprawl and all of its impacts, including more traffic and associated pollution and safety issues.
So far, the Interior Department hasn’t given any indication that it would require the land to be used for affordable housing. And, as Center for Western Priorities points out in a statement on the plan, the administration hardly seems interested in fixing the housing crisis, given that it is planning to eviscerate HUD and has frozen some $60 million in funding for affordable housing.
Which leads me to think they are using Sen. Mike Lee’s stalled HOUSES Act, which also calls for putting houses on “underutilized” federal land, as a model. But that legislation has no affordability restrictions and its density requirement — a mere four houses per acre — is just more sprawl.
That’s because Lee and company are going with the supply side theory, which posits that simply building more houses will lower costs enough to make them affordable. While this theory does hold in certain cases, it does not apply to most Western public lands-gateway, amenities communities, where seemingly unlimited demand is always bound to outpace supply. And that means this plan is just another scheme to take public lands out of Americans’ hands and give them to the private sector.
A bunch of Utah public lands. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Click the link to read the article on the Landdesk.org website (Jonathan P. Thompson):
January 14, 2025
The latest public-land grab attempt is dead — at least for now. On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear Utah’s lawsuit attempting to seize control of 18.5 million acres of “unappropriated” federal lands in the state. This effectively ends Utah’s bid to take its case directly to the Supreme Court1, albeit not before it had spent over $1 million of the state taxpayer’s cash on legal expenses and a goofy PR campaign that included this bizarre ad aimed at inducing nostalgia for an era that never really was.
One might hope that this defeat at the hands of a conservative court would teach Utah’s elected officials to give up and be grateful for the abundance of public land in their state, which is actually the envy of folks everywhere. But alas, I kind of doubt they’d be that wise, because, well … Utah. So after licking their wounds, they’re likely to come back with some other strategy for purloining public lands.
Perhaps they’ll follow the lead of the Wyoming legislature, which just introduced a resolution “demanding that the United States Congress … extinguish federal title in those public lands and subsurface resources in this state that derive from former federal territory.” Which is to say that Wyoming is ordering the U.S. — i.e. all Americans — to surrender public lands within the state, with the exception of Yellowstone National Park, to the state, thus opening it up to be privatized.
Yes, the hard-right Freedom Caucus has taken control of the Wyoming legislature and, according to reporting by WyoFile, they plan to introduce “bold policies that probably have never had the opportunity to see the light of day” and that are based upon “godly principles.”
This would include public land grabs and repealing gun-free zones because, you know, Jesus was all about AR-15s. And it includes the — I kid you not — “Make Carbon Dioxide Great Again” law that would bar the state from designating or treating carbon dioxide as a pollutant. It would also nix Gov. Mark Gordon’s efforts to establish the state as a leader in carbon capture and sequestration technology and actually would relinquish any primacy over carbon storage to the feds. Go figure.
And just in case Congress isn’t cowed by the threat of a Wyoming-lawmaker-led revolt, then Rep. Harriet Hageman will step in with her own federal legislation. While it doesn’t attempt to transfer public land, it is aimed at neutering the Bureau of Land Management by nullifying management plans that have been years in the making. Hageman recently introduced a bill that would block implementation of the Rock Springs and Buffalo field office resource management plans.
Stay tuned. I’m sure we haven’t heard the last of these shenanigans.
The Paradox Valley in western Colorado. The proposed Mustang, née Piñon Ridge, uranium mill would be located on the far side of the valley (center right in the picture). Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
For the past few years, Western Uranium & Vanadium, based in Canada and Nucla, Colorado, has been making a lot of noise about plans to bring its Sunday Mine Complex in the Uravan Mineral Belt into production. It’s also proposing to establish a new uranium mill just outside Green River, Utah — thereby furthering the industrialization of the melon-farming town. So far, however, the mine has not produced any ore, nor has the mill progressed beyond the “baseline data collection” stage.
But that hasn’t stopped the company from keeping the hype going. Yesterday it announced it would begin data collection at the former Piñon Ridge uranium mill site in the Paradox Valley, which it’s now calling the Mustang Mineral Processing Facility.
You may recognize the Piñon Ridge name. Back in 2007, Energy Fuels — the current owner of the White Mesa Uranium Mill — purchased the site and proposed building a uranium mill there. At the time, George Glasier, who currently helms Western Uranium & Vanadium, was Energy Fuel’s CEO. A lot of locals were not so psyched about having a new radioactive site in their midst, and opposition to the proposed mill was fierce.
A twisted saga ensued, finally ending when the state revoked the mill’s permit in 2018. In the interim, Glasier had stepped down from the helm of Energy Fuels, which had acquired the White Mesa Mill, started his own company, and purchased the Piñon Ridge project. Last year, Western U&V acquired the Piñon Ridge project from Glasier’s company. And now Glasier seems to think he can get a newly designed mill permitted (he has yet to apply for a permit). Or maybe he’s just fishing for more investors’ dollars. In any case, the folks who led the resistance to the mill last time are ready to push back once again if necessary.
📖 Reading Room 🧐
Here come those Santa Ana winds again …
The National Weather Service has issued an extreme fire danger bulletin for a good chunk of the greater Los Angeles metro area, including a “particularly dangerous situation” alert, through tomorrow as the Santa Ana winds kick up again. This as the Palisades and Eaton fires continue to burn, having already taken 24 lives and an estimated 12,300 structures.
It’s been stunning to watch the destruction from afar and heartbreaking to imagine the collective sense of loss rippling across the sprawling metropolis of 18 million. The immensity of it all, the rate at which the fires spread, and the way the Santa Anas send flaming embers into the air to spawn their own blazes miles away is horrifying. Equally baffling is the way the tragedy seems to have opened up a firehose of stupidity, finger-pointing, and grandstanding, issuing forth from the President-elect, Elon Musk, political pundits, and and even Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who asked: “Why don’t they use geoengineering like cloud seeding to bring rain down on the wildfires in California? They know how to do it.”2
I considered spending a bunch of words explaining how and why these folks are wrong. But even acknowledging their existence and repeating their inane lies makes me vomit a bit in my mouth, and trying to debunk even a fraction of the claims is to play a futile game of whack a mole, though that’s not stopping California’s government from trying. As an antidote, I’ve been reading some smart things about the fires, the Santa Ana winds, and Los Angeles, and I figured it would be nice to share some of them with you.
Start out with Joan Didion’s essay on the Santa Ana winds, in which she reminds us that this month’s raging Santa Anas aren’t entirely unprecedented. A two-week long Thanksgiving-time Santa Ana event in 1957 included 100-mph gusts that toppled oil derricks, propelled heavy objects through the air (some of which killed people), and drove a blaze through the San Gabriels for well over a week. She writes:
Then check out the opening lines of Raymond Chandler’s Red Wind(and how can you stop reading after this!?):
And the late Mike Davis’s “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn” should be required reading in these times. And yes, it’s quite a bit more nuanced than the title might suggest. Davis gives a good history of post-colonial fires in the Malibu area and explains how in 1930 Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., called for turning 10,000 acres there into a public park (that could have burned in natural cycles, without destroying homes).
Alas, that didn’t happen. Instead, Malibu was developed, and fires roared through there in 1930, 1935, 1936, 1937, and 1938. The city had the opportunity to acquire 17,000 acres for just $1.1 million and turn it into a preserve in 1938 — it passed up the chance. Housing came, instead, along with more destructive fires. He writes:
Each fire, then, was followed by reconstruction on a larger, more exclusive scale. Malibu went from being a ranching, rural area, to a bohemian enclave, to a high-end suburb. “Two kinds of Californians will continue to live with fire:,” Davis writes, “those who can afford (with indirect public subsidies) to rebuild and those who can’t afford to live anywhere else.”
Joshua Frank mentions Davis’s essay in a poignant piece for CounterPunch in which he asks folks to stop their victim-blaming and have a bit of compassion, even if they don’t like L.A.. He writes:
At his Public Lands Media Substack, George Wuerthner talks about how these are really urban wildfires, not forest fires, and so the old mitigation and prevention techniques don’t necessarily apply.
He argues that prescribed burns and thinning wouldn’t have worked, because the fires started in the chaparral, which has a natural fire regime of about 30 to 100 years. Prescribed burns tend to eliminate native species that are then replaced by more flammable grasses.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, fire experts Jack Cohen and Stephen Pyne also talk about how these fires don’t fit into conventional notions of wildfire. In both the Palisades and Eaton fires, there were unburned trees sitting right next to homes that had been totally destroyed. Cohen:
Here’s hoping for an ember-free day for Los Angeles.
1 This was corrected from saying it effectively ended their legal bid. As reader Slickrock Stranger pointed out, that’s not necessarily the case. Utah could still take its case to the lower courts and keep losing until it ends up at the Supreme Court (which could again decline to hear the case, or something else). But SCOTUS did shoot down this particular strategy of going straight to the Supreme Court for a decision.
2 Oh, that’s right, because “they” modified the weather so that Hurricane Helene would wreck the southeast and keep all those Republicans from voting. Yeah. No. First off, Marge, while the theory behind cloudseeding is legit, there is scant evidence that it significantly increases precipitation. And, even so, it only works if there are already moisture-laden clouds present to seed. Thus the name. Now, maybe if They sent a hurricane to L.A. blowing inland from the Pacific, it would cancel out the Santa Anas, which blow toward the ocean, and then we’d be fine. Alas, They can’t control the weather.
I write with a steadfast commitment to Hopi – the land, animals and people that have been in so-called Arizona since life began. We Hopi claim responsibility not just for Arizona life, but for biodiversity throughout the world, endowed to us by the Creator. In my political and nonprofit positions, I’ve worked to protect Bears Ears National Monument, Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni-Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument, and Chaco Canyon. In my current role as a consultant on land protection campaigns with WildEarth Guardians, I am engaged in the Greater Gila campaign, protecting Hopi ancestral homelands in the Gila National Forest and Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests. Unrelenting uranium mining, fracking, livestock grazing and recreational abuse have decimated the land as well as our sacred sites. Tribes, nonprofits and community members cannot afford to backslide during this second Trump administration, and we cannot give away our power by waiting four years.
Through my work with environmental nonprofits and elected officials, I have witnessed small strides toward LandBack, tribal sovereignty and less extractive management of public lands. While I am certainly grateful for actions to protect places sacred to the Hopi and other tribes, I am deeply concerned about this second Trump administration, and the disturbing pattern of Democrats crafting campaigns that are disconnected from the poorest in this country – in rural America and on tribal lands. To address the polycrises of the current moment, we need bold action from decision makers. Standing in the middle of the road will only continue to perpetuate the harms of colonization.
The founding of the United States, and its subsequent accrual of wealth and power, were built on slavery and genocide. Most Native people have never fully recovered from this, continuing to live without access to running water, concerned about our water rights in general, and well aware that the federal government could break treaties at any time – a practice that has never stopped or been fully remediated. We do not need more apologies or statements. We need meaningful, direct action – legislative and community-led, before the Trump administration begins eviscerating the work we have done.
My work with WildEarth Guardians relies on decolonization and addressing past harms – including those done by the conservation movement – to ensure they are not repeated in the future. From the Native perspective, we have always cared about the land, through common teachings, oral history, ceremony and relationships. From the nonprofit perspective, conservation has historically been rooted in science and law. Steps towards honoring and uplifting traditional ecological knowledge and wisdom through co-stewardship, co-management and LandBack efforts must not be abandoned. Courageous allyship from our public servants – congressional and state officials alike – in dismantling an oligarchic takeover of both parties is imperative. We invite you to stand arm in arm with us in a bold renunciation of campaign contributions from entities that enable genocide (both at home and abroad), empower the fossil fuel industry, and generally create more poverty, climate change, racism and extinction. It will not be possible to achieve the continuation of life while also prioritizing re-election through corporate contributions and political vanity.
Clark Tenakhongva, former vice chairman of the Hopi Nation and former co-chairman of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition via his Facbook page.
To protect our sacred lands and, at minimum, hold the line on what tribes have fought for (and won), there must be a bold alternative to Trump’s authoritarianism.To meet these trying times, members of Congress, federal and state agencies, and state legislatures must:
Protect and defendthe existing boundaries of the most vulnerable national monuments, including Bears Ears, Ancestral Footprints, Grand Staircase, and others targeted by the Trump administration.
Recognize that water is life. Contamination of our rivers and streams and underground aquifers are a perpetual problem. Hopi people have significant rates of cancer due to uranium poisoning.
Congress must reform the archaic 1872 Mining Law, which gives free reign to corporations (many of them foreign) to exploit our lands and poison our bodies.
Congress must also ratify and fund the Northeastern Arizona Indian Water Rights Settlement Act of 2024.This urgent matter has already cost our tribes millions of dollars as we’ve searched for an agreement. Securing these water rights is potentially the most important thing Congress can do to immediately benefit the Hopi.
The U.S. government must fully fund agencies like the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service and the U.S. Forest Service. Lack of capacity and law enforcement has led to increased vandalism, looting and illegal ATV use, as well as recreational overuse. The Schultz Fire, in the Coconino National Forest, was started by an abandoned campfire. The 15,000-acre burn destroyed much of our sacred Douglas Fir that we use for ceremonies, and resulted in a new, bureaucratic process for Hopi with the U.S. Forest Service. Permits are now required in a place our ancestors had gathered freely for centuries. This is one example of how an underfunded, understaffed agency, coupled with a push for more tourism, had devastating and far-reaching consequences.
The Biden administration’s Executive Order 13175 mandatesthat federal agencies consult with tribes regarding land management. Congress should uphold this mandate and, in fact, increase contact with tribal governments and communities in order to honor all perspectives. This mandate has not yet resulted in deep or meaningful changes. Support and directives for agencies to meaningfully engage with tribes, even under a second Trump administration, is critical.
As a veteran, I support our troops and responsible military behavior. But low-level military flights over current and ancestral Hopi lands have resulted in poor nesting conditions and survival outcomes for golden eagles and hawks. Military flights have increased over the tribal and ancestral lands of the White Mountain Apache, San Carlos Apache, Tohono O’odham, Hopi and others. We ask that Congress continue to hold the Department of Defense accountable for reckless overflights, dropping flares (which have caused forest fires) and dropping chaff (toxic military training material which contains PFAS and other contaminants).
It is my hope that if elected officials, community members and agencies truly act out the values they purport, we can start down a path of healing. I close this letter with a sincere prayer and a reminder that life is precious.
The Burr Trail as it approaches the western boundary of Capitol Reef National Park. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Click the link to read the article on the Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):
January 17, 2024
🤯 Crazytown Chronicle 🤡
You really can’t make this stuff up: The Garfield County board of commissioners really wants to name a highway in their midst after President-elect Donald Trump. They will consider two options at their Jan. 27 meeting, with the first one being to change the “Burr Trail Scenic Backway” to the “Donald J. Trump Presidential Burr Trail Backway.”
Oy frigging vey.
The Burr Trail, which runs from Boulder, Utah, through Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, the Waterpocket Fold, and Capitol Reef National Park, ending up just outside Ticaboo, started out as a livestock trail in the 1880s and is named after rancher John Atlantic Burr. It is now not only a spectacularly scenic drive, but also one of the most controversial roads in the West.
Portions of the trail became a road in 1948, when the Atomic Energy Commission bulldozed the switchbacks through the Waterpocket Fold to provide motorized access to uranium mining claims. According to a National Park Service history, the road was widely used by uranium miners throughout the ‘50s and into the ‘60s. In 1967 the federal government funded improvements to the route as part of a project to provide road access to the new Bullfrog Marina on Lake Powell (which started filling up in 1963)
The Silver Bullet on the Burr Trail just above the switchbacks in Capitol Reef National Park. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Ever since, Garfield County has wanted to continue to improve the road and, ultimately, pave its entire 66 miles, thinking it would attract a more conventional, bigger-spending brand of tourists than the dirtbag backpackers that frequented the region in the 70s and 80s. The county was in tough shape economically, largely because market forces were crushing the uranium mining industry and small-scale ranching, and so it was looking to fill the void with tourism. In 1983, Wayne County Commissioner and paving advocate H. Dell LeFevre told the New York Times:
Coyote Gulch’s VW Bus South Park 1973.
Environmental groups and the National Park Service, however, have pushed back, saying paving the gravel, washboarded route would encroach on federal lands and increase access — and impacts — to the backcountry. Conservationists launched lawsuits countering county claims that it owns the road and should control how it’s maintained.
The Burr Trail thus became yet another symbol in the long-running culture war over roads, federal land management, and an arcane federal mining law statute known as RS-2477.
In 1987, as an environmental lawsuit seeking to block blacktopping made its way through the courts, someone poured sugar into the fuel tanks of Garfield County bulldozers being used to work on the Trail, a la the Monkey Wrench Gang. A local uranium miner and founding member of what would become the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance was charged with the crime but acquitted.
Shortly thereafter, a district judge ruled against the environmentalists and allowed the BLM to greenlight Garfield County’s bid to blacktop the section of road from Boulder to the western boundary of Capitol Reef National Park.
That didn’t end the battle, however. Garfield County has continued its crusade to pave the remainder of the route, and the Burr Trail has been featured in many a court case. In 1996, the National Park Service dragged the county to court after its crews bulldozed a hill to fix a blind corner. And in 2019, Trump’s Bureau of Land Management permitted it to chip-seal a seven-mile section on the other side of Capitol Reef NP; the county carried out the work before environmentalists had a chance to challenge it. A judge ultimately let the asphalt remain.2
The Burr Trail, in other words, is almost as polarizing as a certain president-elect, which could be one reason a rural Utah county wants to rename the backroad after a Manhattan real estate baron and reality TV show host who has never set foot in that part of the world and sure as hell couldn’t tell a juniper from a piñon tree even if a giant coyote whacked him over his orange head with it.
But Garfield County Commissioner Leland Pollack says he wants to rename the route to show his appreciation for Trump’s first-term policies, including shrinking Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, telling KSL: “This is just a sign of appreciation. This guy right here was good to Garfield County and he was good to all of the Western public land counties.” Sure, Leland.
The Grand Staircase-Escalante Partners opposes the renaming, even going so far as to refuse to utter the proposed new name in its press release. The statement notes:
🌵 Public Lands 🌲
In its waning days, the Biden administration has been quite active on the public lands front. In a future post I’ll get into Biden’s environmental legacy, but for now here’s a quick rundown of some of the administration’s latter-day moves:
Biden’s designation of the Chuckwalla National Monument in southern California adds another link to what is now being called the Moab to Mojave Conservation Corridor, a strip of protected lands that follows the Colorado River from southeastern Utah to the Mojave Desert. Prior to Chuckwalla, Biden bolstered the corridor by restoring Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments and by establishing the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni and Avi Kwa Ame national monuments.
Source: National Parks Conservation Association
The administration finalized the management plans for both Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments. I’m not going to give a full rundown on the plans here, because they are so similar to the draft plans, which I detailed in earlier dispatches (GSENM & Bears Ears). There are a few modifications, however. Perhaps most significant is that a ban on recreational shooting throughout Bears Ears was scaled back to apply only to campgrounds, developed recreation sites, rock writing sites, and structural cultural sites. Meanwhile, both plans, especially Bears Ears, take an overly laissez faire approach to livestock grazing, perpetuating impacts on ecological and cultural resources.
The federal Bureau of Land Management terminated Utah’s right of way for a proposed four-lane highway across the Red Cliffs Conservation Area outside St. George. The state and Washington County have been trying for years to build the road in order to “accommodate” the area’s breakneck growth. In 2020, the Trump administration finally issued a right of way, but conservationists sued and forced the BLM to reconsider. In December, the agency sided with the conservationists, revoking the right of way and suggesting St. George expand the existing Red Hills Parkway rather than build a new road through desert tortoise habitat.
The Interior Department launched the process of banning new mining claims and mineral leases on about 270,000 acres of federal land (plus an additional 40,000 acres of private land the feds hope to acquire) near Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge in Nevada. Conservationists had been looking to get added protections on the area after lithium mining and geothermal energy companies began eyeing it.
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Republican lawmakers have launched their latest bid to diminish a president’s power to protect landscapes and cultural resources. This week, Rep. Celeste Maloy, of Utah (and who happens to be Ammon Bundy’s cousin), and Rep. Mark Amodei, of Nevada, introduced the Ending Presidential Overreach on Public Lands Act, which would gut the 1906 Antiquities Act and end a president’s power to establish national monuments. I doubt this will make it very far, since national monuments and parks are pretty damned popular, and Grand Canyon, Zion, Arches, and many other national parks were first established as national monuments under the Antiquities Act.
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On that note, the Senate held hearings on Trump’s nominee for Interior Secretary, Doug Burgum. Burgum is the former governor of North Dakota, which, by the way, is not considered a public lands state. So it’s a bit bizarre that he’s even being considered for this position — except he is big on fossil fuels and is clearly on board with Trump’s “drill, baby, drill-energy dominance” approach. In the clips I saw, Burgum displayed a lack of knowledge on the public lands he will probably soon oversee. For example, he talked about timber harvesting on public lands, when most public-land logging occurs on U.S. Forest Service land, which is overseen by the Agriculture Department, not Interior. Then he responded to a question about the aforementioned Antiquities Act, saying: “The 1905 Antiquities Act … it’s original intention was to protect … antiquities … areas like Indiana Jones type archaeological protections.” Uhhh… that would be the 1906 act, buddy. And what the hell are Indiana Jones type archaeological protections? Do we really want an Interior Secretary who gleans his knowledge from the movies? Oy.
During his confirmation hearing this AM, @dougburgum.bsky.social said the Antiquities Act was meant only for "Indiana Jones-type archeological protections."Does he know his hero Teddy Roosevelt used the AA to protect 800,000 acres in and around the Grand Canyon?
Energy Fuels — the owner of the White Mesa uranium mill and the Pinyon Plain mine — is perhaps the most active of all the uranium companies making a lot of noise about exploration and reopening long-idled facilities. They are also the most vocal, telling reporters that current safety and environmental standards and regulations and enforcement are far better than during the Cold War era when the industry ravaged lives and the landscape.
As if to prove the point, the federal Mine Safety & Health Administration recently issued 16 citations to Energy Fuels and its contractors working on the company’s La Sal Mines Complex in southeastern Utah. Violations related to radon concentration and radon monitoring requirements, worker training, personal protection equipment use, and explosive material storage.
Sarah Fields, of Uranium Watch, says she’s “never seen this many violations of this nature at an operating uranium mine from a single inspection.”
One of the contractors, Three Steps Resources, is run by Kyle Kimmerle, holder of numerous mining claims throughout southern Utah and a party to Utah’s lawsuit seeking to revoke Bears Ears National Monument.
1 LeFevre would become an outspoken opponent of Bill Clinton’s 1996 designation of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Interestingly, many opponents of that and the Bears Ears designation worried that they would increase industrial-scale tourism.
2 Garfield County also wants to pave a portion, at least, of the Hole-in-the-Rock road, which also crosses a section of GSENM near Escalante. Conservationists are also pushing back.
Red Water Pond Road Community leader, Larry King, addresses plans to relocate the Quivera Mine Waste Pile that is located about 1,000 feet from the closest residence. Shayla Blatchford
As a child, herding her grandmother’s sheep, Teracita Keyanna unknowingly wandered onto land contaminated with radioactive waste from three abandoned uranium mine and mill waste sites located near her home on the Navajo Nation.
Keyanna and other Diné citizens have been living with the consequences of uranium mining near the Red Water Pond Road community since the 1960s. But now, uranium waste rock that has sat for decades at a Superfund site will finally be moved to a landfill off tribal land.
“This is a seismic shift in policy for Indigenous communities,” said Eric Jantz, an attorney for the New Mexico Environmental Law Center.
On Jan. 5, in a first-of-its-kind move, the Environmental Protection Agency signed an action memo to transport 1 million cubic yards of low-grade radioactive waste from the Quivira Mining Co. Church Rock Mine to a disposal site at the Red Rock Regional Landfill. The Northwest New Mexico Regional Solid Waste Authority owns and operates the landfill, which is located about 6 miles east of Thoreau, New Mexico.
“I feel like our community has finally had a win,” Keyanna said. She is a member of the Red Water Pond Road Community Association, a grassroots organization made up of Diné families that have been advocating for the waste removal for almost two decades. “It’ll help the community heal.”
Companies extracted an estimated 30 million tons of uranium ore on or near the Navajo Nation from 1944 to 1986, largely to fuel the federal government’s enormous nuclear arsenal. When the mines were abandoned in the 1980s, the toxic waste remained. Today, there are hundreds of abandoned mines in plain sight on the Navajo Nation, contaminating the water, air and soil. Altogether, there are an estimated 15,000 uranium mines across the West — 1,200 of them on the Navajo Nation alone — with the majority located in the Four Corners region.
The impact of all this mining on Diné communities has been devastating. A 2008 study found uranium contamination in 29 water sources across the Navajo Nation, while other studies show that people living near waste sites face a high risk of kidney failure and various cancers.
At Quivira, the cleanup is set to begin in early 2025 and will continue for six to eight years, according to an EPA news release. The permitting process, which will provide opportunity for public comment, will be overseen by the New Mexico authority that manages the proposed waste site and is responsible for its long-term safety monitoring.
Mine Waste Area with Limited Vegetation. Photo credit: EPA
The EPA had considered multiple options for waste remediation. But for years, Red Water Pond Road advocates and other local organizations continually pushed it to simply remove the waste, a course of action that the EPA has never taken before, even though the Navajo Nation has repeatedly called for the federal government to move all uranium waste from Diné tribal land.
Throughout the Navajo Nation, said Jantz, “prior to this decision, EPA’s primary choice in terms of remediation of mine was to bury the piles under some dirt and plant some grass seeds on top, called cap in place.” But studies have shown that this approach is not effective at containing radioactive waste in the long term, he said.
The agency took a similar approach when addressing the other uranium waste in the Church Rock area. In 2013, the EPA and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which oversees uranium mine-waste cleanup, dumped 1 million cubic yards of waste from the Northeast Church Rock Mine — a different waste site, roughly 3 miles from the Quivira Mine — on top of existing tailings located half a mile from the Red Water Pond Road communities.
But the EPA plans to handle the Quivira Mine’s waste differently, placing it in geoengineered disposal cells with a groundwater leak protection system after it is moved off-site, an approach that Jantz called “state-of-the-art.”
The Quivira Mine cleanup is part of the 2014 Tronox settlement, which provided $5.15 billion to clean up contaminated sites across the United States. The settlement allocated $1 billion of those funds to clean up 50 uranium mines across the Navajo Nation.
There is a lot more to be done, said Susan Gordon, coordinator for the Multicultural Alliance for a Safe Environment, a grassroots organization led by uranium-impacted communities. Hundreds of abandoned mines pepper the Navajo Nation, and the EPA has not formulated a broader plan to clean up the majority of them. Funding is also an issue, she added.
What the EPA’s decision means for the future of uranium mine waste remediation is unclear. Under other circumstances, Jantz said that the decision would signal a sea change for the EPA’s policy of removing waste from the Navajo Nation. But the incoming Trump administration has not indicated its policy on hazardous waste disposal.
This story was originally published by The Land Desk and is republished here by permission.
On a mid-November evening I stood on a gravelly plain, shivering in the wind as clouds dangled their wispy fingers of snow onto Cedar Mesa to the north of me. The long sunset finally fizzled into darkness and I watched for the one-day-past-full moon to rise over the Valley of the Gods. But the dark horizon never yielded the anticipated orb. Instead, I was treated to evanescent shards of orangish light escaping through cracks in the clouds.
I was in southeastern Utah on a nearly flat expanse of scrub-covered limestone some 1,200 feet above the winding and silty San Juan River. I was also just barely inside the boundaries of Bears Ears National Monument. At least for now. But the national monument protections on my little dispersed campsite, along with a good portion of the landscape I looked out upon, will likely go away shortly after President-elect Donald Trump takes office next year.
Last week the New York Timesreported that Trump will again shrink Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments back to the diminished boundaries he established in 2017. The 1.36-million-acre Bears Ears — which President Joe Biden restored in 2021 — will become a 200,000 acre national monument divided into two discrete units. Left out will be Valley of the Gods, Cedar Mesa, the Goosenecks of the San Juan, the White Canyon and Dark Canyon regions, and portions of Butler and Cottonwood Washes.
Raplee Ridge in Bears Ears National Monument.
Photo credit: Jonathan P. Thompson
The act is likely illegal, since the Antiquities Act only gives presidents the power to establish national monuments, not shrink or eliminate them. And it will revive lawsuits still pending since Trump’s previous shrinkage. But while the legal challenges wend their ways through the courts, Trump’s shrinkage will take hold (barring a court injunction). The draft management plan that federal officials and tribal representatives have worked on for years will be rendered obsolete before it’s even approved, and about 1.2 million acres of public land will be re-opened to new mining claims and oil and gas and coal leasing.
There are the conservation consequences to think of, which I’ll get to, but more importantly is the symbolic significance. Bears Ears was originally proposed and conceived of and pushed by five sovereign tribal nations — with the backing of another two dozen tribes — who were looking to protect lands that had been stolen from them and put into the “public domain.” Representatives from those tribes had a hand in crafting the new management plan, which uniquely incorporates Indigenous knowledge into decision-making.
By overturning the national monument, Trump is thumbing his noses at those same tribal nations, essentially telling them that their efforts and ties to this land are meaningless. As I stood out there dissolving into the darkness, a question arose: Why? Why the hell would a Manhattan real estate developer and reality show personality, who probably had never set foot on the West’s public lands, make such a cruel and thoughtless gesture? What was he hoping to achieve?
I’ve posited potential motives for the initial shrinkage. Trump wanted to curry favor with the powerful Sen. Orrin Hatch, of Utah, so he could gut Obamacare and get tax cuts for the wealthy through Congress. He wanted to help out his friends in the uranium mining and oil and gas industries. He wanted to repay Utah voters for abandoning their principles and voting for him.
Snow virgas over Cedar Mesa. Photo credit: Jonathan P. Thompson
But the oil and gas industry isn’t exactly champing at the bit to drill in the Bears Ears area. There are many other more accessible and profitable places to chase hydrocarbons. And in 2017 the domestic uranium mining industry was virtually nonexistent, and its 200 or so employees hardly made for a significant voting bloc. Mark Chalmers and Curtis Moore, the CEO and VP of Energy Fuels, probably the most viable uranium mining and milling company out there, didn’t even donate to any of Trump’s presidential campaigns.
It really seems that Trump diminished Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments for no other reason than to dismantle the environmental legacies of his rivals and predecessors, former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. And given his cabinet picks so far, Trump is planning on more of the same in his second term. He “governs” out of greed and self-interest, first, followed closely by spite — aimed at liberals, his political rivals, and Republicans who don’t show enough fealty to him.
The expected shrinkage won’t have an immediate impact on the landscape where the protections are lifted, which will simply revert back to federal land managed under the multiple-use mandate. Come Jan. 20, there will not be a battalion of drilling rigs marching upon the weird formations of Valley of the Gods or mines opening up in White Canyon’s cliffs.
Yet there will be longer term consequences. All of the debate and back and forth over the national monument has attracted more visitors to the general area, and that has brought more impacts. Taking away national monument status from most of those lands will not reduce visitation, but it will take away resources for and opportunities to manage their impacts. The Trump-era management plan, which was hardly a plan at all and replaced the tribal commission with a bunch of monument opponents, will remain in place, rendering what’s left of the national monument almost meaningless.
After Trump’s first shrinkage, speculators and would-be mining firms staked a handful of claims in lands that had been taken out of Bears Ears national monument. That was when the uranium industry was moribund. Now, higher prices, a renewed interest in nuclear power, and a ban on enriched reactor fuel from Russia has given the industry new life. While uranium production remains minimal, exploration has kicked up significantly, including in lands just outside the Bears Ears boundary. This time around we’re likely to see not only mining claims being staked soon after the shrinkage in places like White Canyon and Cottonwood Creek, but also exploratory drilling. Even if companies don’t have any short-term interest in mining in the area, the drilling can help them establish the claims’ validity, thereby increasing the likelihood that the right to mine those parcels would be locked in if a future administration or the courts were to restore Bears Ears.
Just as night became complete, the moon emerged from behind the clouds and cast a pale light over everything. At the same time, I saw my friends’ truck’s headlights bouncing up the road, so I trudged through the cold to guide them to the campsite. We laughed and talked and played music. One was still reeling from the shock of the presidential election’s outcome, the other, who works with rural communities across the West, had seen Trump’s victory as almost inevitable.
Eventually, I snuggled up in my sleeping bag in my little tent and emerged more than ten hours later, just as the moon was getting ready to set and the sun prepared to rise over the corner of the Carrizo Mountains along the New Mexico-Arizona border. The landscape around me slowly revealed itself as if awakening from slumber. Later, under the almost harsh blue sky, my friends and I made our way almost aimlessly across the scrub-covered plain, trying to avoid the Russian thistle that had proliferated after more than a century of cattle grazing and following the erratic cow paths when we encountered them.
At one point we heard the report of what sounded like a semi-automatic firearm being shot in the distance. It wasn’t a hunter, I’m sure of that. More likely a recreational shooter looking to waste some ammo before the proposed shooting ban goes into effect — though now it’s not likely to. Maybe they were targeting cans, or petroglyphs, or a desert-varnish-covered boulder or grazing cattle. I involuntarily flinched at each bang.
Sunset in Bears Ears National Monument. Photo credit: Jonathan P. Thompson
I walked with gratitude for the beauty all around and the freedom to wander through it. I walked with sadness, too, and anger at those who would try to reduce this place, this living landscape, to a pawn in their petty and vindictive game, and who would try to open it back up to corporations looking to wring every last particle of profit from it. But I also found hope in the knowledge that powerful tribal nations, land protectors and nonprofits will continue their fight to protect this land and challenge the spiteful attempts to diminish this place.
We came to the edge of the San Juan River gorge and dropped into it, following a path forged by gold prospectors back during the “Bluff Excitement” of the early 1890s, when folks thought they could get rich by scouring the San Juan River’s banks for flakes of gold. The gold rush fizzled before it got started, but the trail endures. After reaching its terminus, we stopped our banter and sat quietly and listened to the silty waters gurgle by slowly and watched a red tail hawk frolic reassuringly in the updrafts far above. The future is uncertain, but this much I know: Beauty will persist regardless of who occupies the White House.
The Gold King Mine’s level 7 adit and waste rock dump, boarding house, and other associated structures, circa 1906. Via the Land Desk
Click the link to read the article on the Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):
December 13, 2024
⛏️Mining Monitor ⛏️
The News: After decades of trying, Congress finally passed a “good samaritan” mine remediation bill that could help nonprofits and other non-governmental organizations clean up abandoned mining sites.
The Context: In 1994, the state of Colorado, with the help of Bill Simon and other volunteers, launched the Animas River Stakeholders Group to study and address abandoned mines in the upper Animas River watershed. It would be a collaborative approach — without heavy-handed regulations or the dreaded Superfund designation. “We figured we could empower the people in the community to do the job without top-down management,” Simon told me back in 2016. “Giving the power to the people develops stewardship for the resource, and that’s particularly useful in this day and age.”
Their task was a monumental one: The US Geological Survey has catalogued some 5,400 mine shafts, adits, tunnels, and prospects in the upper Animas watershed. Nearly 400 of them were found to have some impact on water quality, about 60 of which were major polluters, contributing about 90% of the mining-related heavy metal loading in streams. Dozens of abandoned mine adits collectively oozed more than 436,000 pounds of aluminum, cadmium, copper, iron, and zinc into the watershed each year, with waste rock and tailings piles contributing another 80,000 pounds annually.1
The upper Animas isn’t unusual in this respect. A 2020 Government Accountability Office report estimated that there are more than 500,000 abandoned mining-related sites and features across the Western United States. While most of those are hardly noticeable and have little effect on the environment, at least 100,000 of them were found to pose physical or environmental hazards.
Those hazards range from open mine shafts (that can swallow up an unsuspecting human or animal), to contaminated tailings or waste rock piles, to the big one: mine adits discharging heavy metal-laden acid mine drainage into streams. Federal and state programs exist to address some of these hazards. But the sheer number of problematic sites, and the fact that many are on private lands, makes it impossible for these agencies to remediate every abandoned mining site.
So, for the last few decades, nonprofits and collaborative working groups like the Animas River Stakeholders have taken up some of the slack. With funding from federal and state grants and mining companies, the Stakeholders removed and capped mine waste dumps, diverted runoff around dumps (and in some cases around mines), used passive water treatment methods on acidic streams, and revegetated mining-impacted areas.
This image was taken during the peak outflow from the Gold King Mine spill at 10:57 a.m. Aug. 5, 2015. The waste-rock dump can be seen eroding on the right. Federal investigators placed blame for the blowout squarely on engineering errors made by the Environmental Protection Agency’s-contracted company in a 132-page report released Thursday [October 22, 2015]
But the most pernicious polluters — the draining adits — were off limits. The volunteer groups couldn’t touch them, because to do so would require a water discharge permit under the Clean Water Act, and that would make the Stakeholders liable for any water that continues to drain from the mine, and if anything went wrong. In other words, if some volunteers were trying to remediate the drainage from a mine, and it blew out Gold King-style, the volunteers would be responsible for the damage it inflicted — which could run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
For the last 25 years, the Animas River Stakeholders2, Trout Unlimited, other advocacy groups, and Western lawmakers have pushed for “good samaritan” legislation that would allow third parties to address draining mines without taking on all of the liability. Despite bipartisan support, however, the bills struggled and ultimately perished.
That’s in part due to concerns that bad actors might use the exemptions to shirk liability for mining a historic site. Or that industry-friendly EPA administrators might consider mining companies to be good samaritans. And back in 2015 Earthworks pointed out that good samaritan legislation wouldn’t address the big problem: A lack of funding to pay the estimated $50 billion cleanup bill. So if a volunteer group did trigger a Gold King-like disaster, the taxpayers would likely end up footing the bill.
But last year, Sen. Martin Heinrich, a New Mexico Democrat, and 39 co-sponsors from both parties introduced the Good Samaritan Remediation of Abandoned Hardrock Mines Act, tightened up to alleviate most concerns. It passed the Senate in July of this year, and was sent to the House, where it also received support from Republicans and Democrats alike.
Assuming President Biden signs it into law, the new act will open the door to more cleanups — but in a limited way. To begin with, the bill only authorizes 15 pilot projects nationwide, which will be determined via an application process. The proponents will receive special good samaritan cleanup permits and must follow a rigorous set of criteria. No mining activities will be allowed to occur in concert with a good samaritan cleanup. However, reprocessing of historic waste rock or tailings may be allowed, but only in sites on federal land, and only if all of the proceeds are used to defray remediation costs or are added to a good samaritan fund established by the act.
Rep. Frank Pallone, a New Jersey Democrat, opposed the bill nonetheless, saying it compromises federal environmental law and “opens the floodgates for bad actors to take advantage of Superfund liability shields and loopholes.” He added that it would give the incoming Trump administration “unilateral power to decide which entities are good samaritans and which are not.”
This isn’t, however, a blanket loophole, it only applies to 15 projects — at least for now. While that limits the damage that could be done by bad actors abusing the liability shields, it also limits the benefits: Fifteen projects isn’t going to go very far in addressing the 100,000 or so hazardous mine sites. The Animas River watershed may not benefit at all, since the 48 sites in the Bonita Peak Mining District Superfund site are not eligible for good samaritan remediation.
Still, the law will open the door for a handful of projects that could improve water quality in some watersheds. The challenge now is figuring out how to address draining mines in an economically feasible fashion. Simply plugging, or bulkheading, the mine adits often isn’t effective, because the contaminated water ends up coming out somewhere else. And treating the draining water is an expensive, and never-ending, process.
The good news is that some funding was made available via the Infrastructure and Inflation Reduction laws passed during the last four years, and just this week the Biden administration gave mining cleanup a boost this week by offering states $3.7 million in grants to inventory, assess, and remediate abandoned hardrock mines.
The bad news is that the legislation that’s really needed — genuine and substantial mining law reform — probably is on hold for at least the next four years.
Prior to mining, snowmelt and rain seep into natural cracks and fractures, eventually emerging as a freshwater spring (usually). Graphic credit: Jonathan Thompson
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In other mining news, the Biden administration this week halted new mining claims and mineral leasing for the next two years on 165,000 acres in the upper Pecos River watershed west of Santa Fe, New Mexico. The “segregation,” as the action is called, is designed to allow the Interior Department to determine whether to ban mining and drilling in the area for the next 20 years.
Included within the acreage are more than 200 active mining claims held by Comexico LLC, a subsidiary of Australia-based New World Resources. For the past several years, Comexico has been working its way through the permitting process to do exploratory drilling at what it calls its Tererro mining project. It has met with stiff resistance from locals and regional advocacy groups, partly because mining has a dark history in the Pecos River watershed. In 1991, a big spring runoff washed contaminated mine and mill waste from a long-defunct mine into the upper Pecos River, killing as many as 100,000 trout. That prompted a multi-year cleanup of various mining sites.
But the withdrawal won’t stop the project outright, because it doesn’t affect existing, active, valid claims. Yet it can keep the company from staking more claims and may make it harder to develop the existing ones (especially if they haven’t established validity).
What was a bit more of a surprise to me is how it broke down into categories.
📸 (Not Quite) Parting Shot 🎞️
The old Buick at Cow Canyon Trading Post and Cafe in Bluff, Utah, my favorite place to stop and get caffeinated and breakfast burrito’d in Canyon Country. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
1 These figures did not include the recently closed Sunnyside Mine/American Tunnel or the Gold King, since both were permitted mines at the time, meaning they weren’t abandoned.
2 The ARSG disbanded after much of the watershed was designated a Superfund site.
Prior to mining, snowmelt and rain seep into natural cracks and fractures, eventually emerging as a freshwater spring (usually). Graphic credit: Jonathan Thompson
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Rachel Cohen). Here’s an excerpt:
December 12, 2024
More than 140,000 abandoned hardrock mines scatter federal lands in the Western U.S. Their cleanup could be getting easier, thanks to a bill that cleared its final hurdle in Congress this week…Finally, this week, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bipartisan bill called the Good Samaritan Remediation of Abandoned Hardrock Mines Act, which the Senate had already passed this summer. It creates a pilot program under the Environmental Protection Agency that allows nonprofits, governments or landowners to clean up old mines without taking on the risk…
“Historically, the fear of litigation and liability that might trail a would-be ‘good Samaritan’ has kept us from doing a lot of that clean-up work,” said Chris Wood, the president and CEO of Trout Unlimited, which works to remediate mine tailings to improve water quality. Wood said the organization faces obstacles to do as much cleanup as it would like because of the liability concerns. He’s been working to remove these hurdles for two decades.
The BLM has released its final environmental review of the proposed Bears Ears National Monument management plan that will replace the existing, 2020 Trump-era plan. Like the draft plan, it places a strong emphasis on tribal co-management and incorporating traditional Indigenous knowledge into decision making, education, and interpretation. Tribal input will mostly come via the Bears Ears Commission, made up of representatives from each of the five tribal nations that initially proposed the national monument in 2015.
And, as with the draft plan, the preferred alternative is less restrictive than the preservation-focused one in most respects. Livestock grazing, for example, will continue on largely as it has in the past; firewood harvesting as well as gathering of ceremonial plants will be allowed; motorized travel will still be allowed on designated routes through much of the monument; and dispersed camping will continue, with some limits.
The final plan drops even as the state of Utah and its co-plaintiffs press on with their lawsuit seeking to eviscerate or eliminate the national monument — and diminish the Antiquities Act as a whole. The plaintiffs assert that Congress intended the Antiquities Act to apply only to specific objects, not landscapes or the context in which those “objects” exist. The lawyers who devised this argument apparently have not seen the Grand Canyon, one of the first national monuments established under the Antiquities Act, which is clearly a landscape, not a discrete “object.” (I further refute their arguments here).
The landscape-scale designation allegedly imperils the plaintiffs — a rancher, a miner, an off-road lobbying group, and a Ute Mountain Ute tribal member — because the accompanying restrictions would “upend traditions and existing ways of life across the area” by making it impossible to continue ranching, mining, off-road riding, and harvesting ceremonial plants across all 1.36 million acres.
In fact, the proposed management plan allows all of those activities to continue, thereby further weakening the plaintiffs’ already feeble argument. Even mining can occur on existing, active, valid claims, which I’ll get to in a moment. A judge tossed the lawsuit last August, and last week the plaintiffs gave it another try in a federal appeals court; a decision isn’t expected for months.
So far, environmental groups have tentatively supported the plan. Meanwhile, the strongest opposition has come from the NSSF, or the Firearm Industry Trade Association, which balked at the decision to ban recreational shooting throughout the monument. More on that below.
Here are some of the key provisions in the final plan that stood out (in no particular order):
The national monument will be divided into four zones: Front Country (21,407 acres along paved highways where visitor infrastructure would be concentrated); Passage (26,000 acres along other travel routes and throughways); Outback (542,361 acres that would “provide an unsupported backcountry experience” with dispersed camping), and Remote (775,000 acres for a “natural and undeveloped experience for non-motorized and non-mechanized recreation with an emphasis on protecting the most fragile and least-accessible areas…”)
Dispersed camping would be allowed in much of the monument except around streams, developed recreation areas, and wherever else it’s necessary to protect the national monuments’ resources. Agencies and the Bears Ears Commission would work to determine which areas would allow dispersed camping and which would be limited to designated sites.
Under the draft plan, no commercial filming would be allowed. In the final plan the agencies backed off on that and changed it to allow filming unless it “causes an appreciable disturbance to BENM resources or takes place in Tribal Nations’ sacred sites.”
Pets would need to be leashed throughout the monument and would not be allowed in the Cedar Mesa Backpacking Sub-Area, Doll House, and potentially some other sites.
Climbing: Replacement of existing bolts/anchors/etc. would be allowed on existing routes as needed for safety and any new climbing or canyoneering routes that require fixed gear would need approval from agencies.
Hunting would be allowed within the monument in accordance with state laws, but recreational shooting would be banned. This will protect the soundscape, make it safer for other visitors, and protect rock art panels and other cultural sites. As disturbing as it may be, many if not most petroglyph panels in the Bears Ears area have been marred by gunshots. This ban is aimed at providing a further level of protection. The NSSF, a firearm industry lobbying group, balked at the ban, claiming that it amounts to blocking access to federal land and is therefore illegal. This is simply false, obviously. Recreational shooters can access the monument; they just can’t shoot recreationally while they’re on it.
A petroglyph panel in Bears Ears National Monument irreparably damaged by recreational shooters. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
While mechanical methods would be allowed for vegetation management, chaining would be banned.
Travel Management: Under the existing, Trump-era plan, about 436,000 acres of the national monument are closed to off-highway vehicles. The proposed plan would close 637,615 acres to OHVs. While it’s an increase, it still leaves about 727,000 acres open to OHV travel on thousands of miles of designated routes. That’s a heck of a lot of territory that remains open to the likes of the Blue Ribbon Coalition, one of the lawsuit plaintiffs. And while the draft plan would have banned all motorized travel in Arch Canyon, the final proposal backs off on that and would allow OHV travel along the sensitive canyon floor with a permit. The permit system has yet to be developed.
Bicycles would be limited to routes where OHV use is allowed and to trails specifically designated for bikes.
Running cattle near Valley of the Gods in Bears Ears National Monument. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Livestock grazing will be prohibited on 162,217 acres, meaning that the remaining 1.2 million acres will be available to the likes of Zeb Dalton, a livestock operator, federal grazing allotment holder, and plaintiff in the state’s lawsuit seeking to revoke the monument. Dalton claims that if his efforts to rescind the monument designation were to fail, he’d be forced to go out of business due to the “tremendous regulatory burdens and compliance costs.” Yet Dalton provides no evidence that the monument’s establishment or restoration of the original boundaries has in any way increased these burdens, nor does the proposed management plan increase restrictions on grazing. And under the current regime, while there are nearly 60,000 permitted animal unit months, or AUMs, on the monument, only about 34,000 of those have been billed, meaning ranchers are only using about 58% of the available spaces for cattle — voluntarily, not because of any restrictions. The proposed plan would increase the number of available AUMs, potentially allowing even more cattle on the national monument.
There is one major change that could affect livestock operations: If a rancher were to voluntarily relinquish their federal grazing allotment within the national monument, that allotment would be retired permanently, meaning the BLM or USFS would not be able to lease it out to another operator. This may mean that grazing is phased out from the monument over the very long term. But it also opens the door for conservation groups to purchase grazing allotments from willing sellers so they can retire them. This can be very lucrative for the livestock operator who is looking to get out of the public lands grazing business.
Another plaintiff in the lawsuit is Ute Mountain Ute tribal member Suzette Morris. According to the complaint, the national monument has restricted Morris’ ability to practice her traditions because she “depends on having ready access to these lands so that she can remove certain resources from them (e.g., cedar post, firewood, medicinal herbs).” Under the proposed management plan, Morris would continue to be able to harvest cedar posts, firewood, medicinal herbs, and other plants and trees for traditional or ceremonial purposes. Furthermore, the agencies would work with tribal nations to “provide for the monitoring, management, protection, and access to vegetation types import to Indigenous ceremonial or other traditional uses.”
A map showing some active mining claims within and adjacent to Bears Ears National Monument. The Kimmerle claims mentioned below are indicated by the A. A rundown on the other claims can be found here.
The national monument designation withdrew all 1.36 million acres from new mining claims and oil and gas leases. However, it does not block development of existing, active, valid mining claims and leases. The trick here is with the “valid” part. A mining claim can be active so long as the claimant keeps up on their yearly maintenance fees. The validity of a claim, on the other hand, depends on the discovery of a valuable mineral deposit there, which must be demonstrated. Active claims within the monument don’t go away, but they also can’t get an operation permit unless they are also valid claims. Kyle Kimmerle, yet another plaintiff in the lawsuit, claims that the estimated $100,000 cost of demonstrating validity is blocking him from mining his uranium claims in the White Canyon area — and earning $2 million to $3 million in profit. And thus, he has destroyed his own argument, for if he is so sure of that bonanza, then he should have no problem laying down $100,000 up front, since he would get a 2,000% to 3,000% return on his investment. Kimmerle holds hundreds of mining claims in southeastern Utah, most of them in uranium-rich areas such as the Lisbon Valley. And yet he chose one in a national monument to apply for an operating permit, shortly before joining up as a plaintiff in this lawsuit. Kinda makes you wonder about motives, doesn’t it?
I’ve barely scratched the surface of this document and the plan it lays out. I’d strongly encourage y’all to give it a gander yourself. It has interesting chapters on the tribal nations’ ties to the landscape, on the wildlife that lives there, and even on the economic effects of the plan. The planning process now enters its final phase and the agencies are expected to make a final decision and adopt the plan in coming months. Read it here.
An oil and gas drilling rig in Wyoming BLM’s High Desert District. (Wyoming BLM/FlickrCC)
Click the link to read the article on the WyoFile website (Angus M. Thuermer Jr.):
October 25, 2024
Wyoming is backing an effort by Utah to wrest ownership of U.S. Bureau of Land Management land from the federal government, arguing that states could “develop the land to attract prospective citizens.”
In an amicus brief filed Tuesday, Wyoming, Idaho, Alaska and the Arizona Legislature expressed support for Utah’s quest to take its case straight to the U.S. Supreme Court. Utah wants to own BLM land that’s currently the property of all Americans, saying among other things that the federal holdings deprive the Beehive State of an equal footing with other states.
Gov. Mark Gordon announced the Wyoming plea this week. Wyoming’s U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman lent her name to a separate amicus brief supporting Utah, teaming with U.S. Sens. Mitt Romney, Mike Lee and other Western members of Congress.
Twenty-six Wyoming legislators also asked Tuesday to join the action if the Supreme Court agrees to take up the issue. Those 10 state senators and 16 representatives (see list below) say they might not stop after gaining state ownership of BLM’s property which is largely sagebrush and desert prairie steppe.
Wyoming legislators’ could extend their claims to “all former federal territorial lands … now held by the United States … [including] parks, monuments, wilderness, etc.,” their brief states.
Oregon Buttes near South Pass are in a BLM wilderness study area in Sweetwater County. (Ecoflight)
The federal government has until Nov. 21 to respond to what conservationists call a “land grab.”
“This lawsuit is as frivolous as they come and a blatant power-grab by a handful of Utah politicians whose escalating aggression has become an attack on all public lands as we know them,” Jocelyn Torres, an officer with the Conservation Lands Foundation, a Colorado nonprofit, said in a statement.
Unappropriated
Utah and its allies argue that BLM lands are “unappropriated” and should be the property of Western States. Because of the federal government’s “indefinite retention” of 18.5 million BLM acres, “Utah is deprived of basic and fundamental sovereign powers as to more than a third of its territory,” its bill of complaint states.
Sagebrush rebellion efforts like Utah’s legal gambit have popped up — and fallen short — repeatedly since the movement arose in the 1970s. They’ve been countered in part by western states ceding — in their constitutions at statehood — ownership of federal property to the government and all Americans.
“The people inhabiting this state do agree and declare that they forever disclaim all right and title to the unappropriated public lands lying within the boundaries thereof,” the Wyoming Constitution states. Further, Western states received federal property at statehood — two square miles in many surveyed 36-square-mile townships in Wyoming — to support schools and other institutions.
“Only Congress can transfer or dispose of federal lands,” the Lands Foundation said.
Gov. Gordon sees it differently.
“Wyoming believes it is essential for the states to be recognized as the primary authority when it comes to unappropriated lands within our borders,” he said in a statement Thursday.
The BLM manages 28% of the land in Wyoming, the brief states, most of it “unappropriated.”
Leaving vexing legal complexities to Utah, Wyoming’s brief focuses on “harms that federal ownership of unappropriated lands uniquely imposes on western States on a daily basis,” the amicus filing states. “In short, western States’ sovereign authority to address issues of local concern is curtailed, and billions of dollars are diverted away from western States.”
A ruling in favor of Utah would “begin to level the playing field … and restore the proper balance of federalism between western States and the federal government,” the brief states.
If Utah prevails, Western states “would then have a fair chance to develop the land to attract prospective citizens,” Wyoming contends. Ownership of federal BLM land would let Wyoming and its allies “use and develop land … and reinvest more of the revenue generated.”
Wyoming’s 29-page brief concludes with the assertion that “[g]ranting the relief requested in Utah’s bill of complaint would make clear that western States are not second-class sovereigns.”
Legislators may want more
Wyoming lawmakers say that Wyoming expected at statehood that Congress would some day “dispose” of the BLM lands in question as it had done with other states. Instead, lawmakers argue the federal government is exercising an unconstitutional police power in holding onto the property.
Turning the BLM land over to Wyoming would create a boom, lawmakers assert. “Developing natural resources in Wyoming could create thousands of jobs, generate billions of dollars in economic activity, and significantly boost the State’s economy,” the 10-page brief states.
Hageman and her D.C. legal allies say the U.S. Supreme Court has no choice but to hear the case.
The federal government denies Utah “basic sovereign powers,” Hageman and the other states’ congressional delegates say.
“[W]hat the United States is doing to Utah is not directly analogous to one sovereign nation’s physical invasion of another, the brief states.” But existing federal control is just as serious as war, the brief contends, and needs to be addressed now.
The Supreme Court has never required states “to make a showing that war is actually justified,” when considering whether to immediately address a complaint like Utah’s,” Hageman’s brief states. “Instead, the standard is whether the federal government’s actions would amount to an invasion and conquest of that land if … Utah were a separate sovereign nation.”
Here’s a list of the Wyoming legislators who filed a brief in support of Utah.
Senators
Bo Biteman (R-Ranchester), Brian Boner (R-Douglas),
Tim French (R-Powell), Larry Hicks (R-Baggs), Bob Ide (R-Casper), John Kolb (R-Rock Springs), Dan Laursen (R-Powell), Troy McKeown (R-Gillette), Tim Salazar (R-Riverton), Cheri Steinmetz (R-Lingle).
Representatives
Bill Allemand (R-Midwest), John Bear (R-Gillette), Jeremy Haroldson (R-Wheatland), Scott Heiner (R-Green River), Ben Hornok (R-Cheyenne), Christopher Knapp (R-Gillette), Chip Neiman (R-Hulett), Pepper Ottman (R-Riverton), Sarah Penn (R-Lander), Rachel Rodriguez-Williams (R-Cody), Daniel Singh (R-Cheyenne), Allen Slagle (R-Newcastle), Scott Smith (R-Lingle), Tomi Strock (R-Douglas), Jeanette Ward (R-Casper), John Winter (R-Thermopolis).
Sagebrush has succesfully matured in one of Grand Teton National Park’s oldest reclamation sites, pictured. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)
The first time I visited Peehee Mu’huh, mining for lithium had already begun.
I was there in the fall of 2023 as part of my work with People of Red Mountain, descendants of the Fort McDermitt Paiute-Shoshone Tribe who lead the movement against extraction on this sacred landscape. We gathered at the valley in northern Nevada, known as Thacker Pass, to commemorate the massacre of 31 Paiute-Shoshone people there by the U.S. Cavalry on Sept. 12, 1865.
Historic violence underlies the importance of Peehee Mu’huh, a site whose name means “rotten moon” in Paiute — a reference to the massacre. Yet the place’s spiritual significance to Great Basin Indigenous peoples runs deeper. They have long come here to hunt, gather food and medicine, workshop, fish, and sojourn for ceremony and family gatherings.
None of these connections were included in Tribal consultations for the Thacker Pass Lithium Mine — because, essentially, there were no consultations.
Sure, the government said it consulted the Tribes. As part of the standard environmental impact statement process — which is intended to mitigate ecological and cultural harms on Bureau of Land Management public lands — three local reservations each received a letter outlining the plans to mine lithium. Unfortunately this occurred during COVID-19 lockdowns when Tribal councils closed and many Tribal members were ill. Still, those unanswered letters were considered “input” by native community members on the 18,000-acre mine slated to produce electric vehicle batteries out of their ancestral homelands.
After that, a social movement emerged to challenge the lack of consent, affirm the significance of this space, and resist the sacrifice of Indigenous sacred landscapes to extract “energy transition minerals” like lithium — over 50% of which lie within Indigenous lands.
It was that movement that brought me to Thacker Pass.
On the first night after I arrived, the sun set to reveal a radiant orange-sorbet sky. Below our perch on the ridge, everyone could see miners scraping the surface and hear diesel trucks and engines droning ominously.
Peehee Muhuh showing early phases of mine development, September 2023 photo by Sam Orndorff
That winter I made further visits while producing a documentary with People of Red Mountain. Snow crunched underfoot as we took in the landscape changes: a pipeline siphoning water from Quinn River, electric lines, and ancillary facilities for the open-pit mine.
To picture the other major impact to come — a planned 1,300-acre waste dump — I would have to use my imagination.
Waste and the Courts
To dig up every pound of lithium, the mine will remove thousands of pounds of rock, soil, and other minerals, most of which will not be used and are considered waste.
That’s the secret of mining: It requires significant space to dump its byproducts.
Mine waste is no longer in the forefront for the environmental movement as it was when coal and nuclear power had their heyday, but it remains a key issue activists and scholars should be following. At Thacker Pass the 1,300 acres of wasteland will occupy the space indefinitely. Arsenic, antimony, and other hazards from the refining process to get lithium from the clay will pile up in this backfill pit and leach into the soils, watersheds, and air.
Efforts to handle the threat of mining waste like this seemed to improve for a brief stint a few years ago. In 2019 a federal appeals court ruled that Rosemont Copper Company, which was digging copper on U.S. Forest Service lands in Arizona, was required to prove the existence of minerals on all of the ground they covered, including an area sited for waste “tailings” dumps but under which they had not proven minerals. This would prevent them from dumping waste on nearby land not part of the actual mining. Having to prove the existence of minerals on land that would be used to dump mine waste became a cumbersome precedent for the industry.
An appeals court upheld that policy in 2022. Through these cases ambiguity in mining law was supposedly clarified, and a modest victory in halting the loss of Forest Service lands to mining seemed to have been won.
A federal judge found the Rosemont decision to be applicable in a 2023 appeals against the Thacker Pass Lithium Mine, but ultimately this held no sway. Citing Rosemont, the judge miraculously admitted that BLM had erred in permitting the 1,300-acre tailings area without verifying that the mine company had proven mineral resources underneath. Despite this the court refused to vacate the mine’s approval and assured Lithium Americas Corporation that the agency would patiently walk them through amending their claims to be compliant without stopping work. Mining that had been paused restarted.
The Need for Reform
So what did Rosemont, supposedly the “most significant federal court decision on mining in decades,” amount to? Nothing substantial. Yet Rosemont is still widely reported as a critical, threatened precedent. This shows the need not only for better information about mining (more minerals, and a broader variety of them, are used in renewables), but also for mining reform. It illustrates that we must pay attention to the landscapes being sacrificed in a “just transition” from fossil fuel energy and transportation.
A new bill before Congress aims to strip away even the baby-steps reform of Rosemont. The Mining Regulatory Clarity Act (HR2925) passed the House in May and awaits Senate approval (S1281). One would assume a bipartisan effort with such a name would offer progress, but the bill guts Rosemont by removing the requirement of claimants to prove minerals before using and dumping waste on public land.
A competing bill, the Green Energy Minerals Reform Act, would introduce requirements such as paying mineral royalties and funding cleanup — basic protections that should have already been in force. Congress held hearings about this proposed legislation in late 2023, but it has not moved forward since.
Colonialism Run Amok
Historically miners have faced minimal oversight. Any individual could venture onto public lands and stake a claim to the minerals they contained — rights to occupy the land were established merely by proving a mineral’s presence and getting there first. Unlike loggers on public land, miners don’t pay any royalties; mine leases on public lands cost as little as $3 dollars per acre.
You might be forgiven for thinking this scenario sounds like something out of the 1800s prospector and ‘49ers era — and in fact, it is. Mining law was last meaningfully legislated under the 1872 General Mining Act.
Just as with the Black Hills gold rush in the Dakota Territory and those in Oregon and California, mine fervor during the gold and silver rushes that white settlers led on the red-colored mountains of Paiute-Shoshone lands in the 1850s-60s was violent and met by Indigenous resistance.
Gold Dust, Gold Point Ghost Town, Esmeralda County Nevada September 2020. Photo credit: James Marvin Phelps via Flickr
That resistance was crushed. Many noncombatants were killed and others forcibly displaced to Washington; the destruction continued for decades and hasn’t stopped yet.
Today the land base of the Paiute, Shoshone, and Bannock peoples of the area — collectively known as Atsawkoodakuh wyh Nuwu or Red Mountain Dwellers — is permeated by both abandoned and active mines. Gold and tungsten mining waned in the early to mid-1900s, but then companies started extracting uranium and mercury at the McDermitt and Cordero mines across the road from Fort McDermitt. According to Department of the Interior archives, this was the nation’s largest mercury mine from the 1930s to the 1970s. After the Cordero mine closed, crews spread arsenic-contaminated waste from the mine around the town and reservation as a fill dirt. The region was later declared a Superfund site, and the contaminants were removed between 2009 and 2013.
But the toxic waste caused decades of harm in the community before that removal. In a brazen environmental injustice, many Tribal members who worked there perished of cancer. Sunoco and Barrick Gold, the companies that exploited the quicksilver lode, simply “declined” the EPA’s order to clean up the area and escaped culpability.
Now the sacred landscape of Peehee Mu’huh will become the country’s largest lithium bounty.
In an attempt to distance themselves from past mining injustices, spokespeople for Lithium Nevada Corporation present a new story, saying they use mitigation and undertake community engagement. In a June 2023 appeal hearing, they even claimed that, after mitigation, only five acres of the 17,933-acre project area would have “permanent disturbance for wildlife and habitat.” Indeed, they would leave a “net conservation gain” using the state’s conservation credit scheme.
But far from bringing a “gain,” this will devastate local ecology. Scientists have documented that greater sage grouse (Centrocercus urophiasanus) live in the area and return to their mating grounds, or leks, in the same spot. Once that land is gone, the birds are gone. Plans to reseed native plants or number-crunch to make habitat materialize on paper cannot change that fact. As scholars have shown, theoretical (i.e. empty) habitat is not the same thing as a population, but the system for healing post-mine lands mandates such scams to justify ecosystem destruction.
Due to livestock production, sprawling car-centered urbanization, and other factors, the sagebrush steppe biome is one of the most threatened ecosystems in the western United States. Near-threatened species like greater sage grouse and Lahontan cutthroat trout (Oncorhynchus clarkii henshawi) face encroachments and irreversible change.
Meanwhile the McDermitt Caldera, the extinct volcanic hotspot where Peehee Mu’huh rests, now contains four more proposed lithium and uranium mines. Whether these resources will enact a profound cut in fossil fuel pollution remains to be seen.
What is easy to envision, however, is mining that continues wiping out carbon-sequestering sagebrush, the further suppression of mass transit by the fossil-fuel lobbies, and the dominance of cars. Last year General Motors invested $650 million in Thacker Pass, surpassed by the Department of Energy’s $2.26 billion loan to the mine company in March. The People of Red Mountain face new barriers and constrictions on their own homeland at the expense of EV-mobility for well off consumers afar.
Moving Forward
The social movement has shifted toward broadly protecting McDrmitt Caldera as a cultural landscape and critical habitat, as well as supporting the creation of a nearby Owyhee Canyonlands National Monument to pause new extraction in the northern stretch of Paiute-Shoshone lands.
Yet the proposed national monument — like other Forest Service, designated wilderness areas, and even national park lands — does not ban extraction outright. The proposed monument boundary also excludes McDermitt Caldera, where sage grouse dance on their mating grounds and Lahontan cutthroat trout swim through the canyon streams.
Conservation easements are one option that may bring more land into Tribal resource management and protection. Another key method to protect sacred landscapes is for all entities to respect Tribes’ consent — and fundamental right — to accept or decline development projects on their lands, per the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Perhaps what’s needed at a broader scale is awareness that Indigenous peoples are guardians of biodiversity. Mining and car companies are unlikely to lead the way to equitable, low-emissions futures since they focus on profit. We must reconnect the struggle for climate justice in our atmosphere to the quest for Indigenous land rights on the ground.
Left unchecked, colonial extraction patterns will undermine a “just transition,” leading instead to an unjust continuation of familiar forms of environmental oppression.
Map of Nevada’s major rivers and streams via Geology.com.
Prior to mining, snowmelt and rain seep into natural cracks and fractures, eventually emerging as a freshwater spring (usually). Graphic credit: Jonathan Thompson
Across the state, Colorado has 23,000 abandoned mines awaiting cleanup. Untreated, these mines spread acid mine drainage into an estimated 1,800 streams. Many of these legacy mines — inoperational areas with historic mining activity — leach heavy metals into watersheds, harming aquatic ecosystems. Cleaning up mines could help improve water quality and contribute to healthier watersheds. Colorado’s Water Resources and Agriculture Review Committee recently advanced a bill to help remove dangerous mining waste. Bill 4 would establish a new permit process through the Division of Reclamation, Mining, and Safety in the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) to facilitate the removal of mining waste. The permits are intended for projects that would improve water quality by cleaning up mines that are no longer operational. Currently, Colorado laws make some cleanup efforts challenging due to strict regulations that are intended to protect the ecosystem from mining operations — not reclamation of legacy mines. The new permit type would focus on areas that are “sources of discharge,” leaking acid mine drainage or heavy metals into the watershed. Permit applicants would still be required to comply with any applicable surface or groundwater water quality conditions. If approved, the bill would help expedite “reclamation-only” permits issued starting in July 2025…
The “Bonita Peak Mining District” superfund site. Map via the Environmental Protection Agency
Locally, the region’s history of mining still affects water quality today. Critical headwaters in the San Juans are surrounded by old mining areas. On Red Mountain Pass between Ouray and Silverton, Red Mountain Creek runs orange. Both natural minerals and ceased mining operations contribute to the creek’s hue. Heaps of mine tailings also funnel the river in a straight line into the Uncompahgre River and down into Ridgway. Bill 4 is intended to incentivize clean up of some of these 23,000 abandoned mines across the state, while improving water quality.
