DEATH VALLEY NATIONAL PARK — The rocky palisades ringing this desiccated valley are as laden with ore as they are famously inhospitable.
For 150 years, miners have contended with the region's hostile conditions, drawn by the glint that first caught the eyes of forty-niners on their way to the gold fields of the distant Sierra. Besides the malevolent heat and blistering winds, modern miners face intense human opposition in a place steeped in the history of mineral extraction.
The latest dispute involves Canyon Resources, a Colorado-based company that has been mining gold in the Panamint Mountains since 1996 on the southwestern flank of Death Valley, just outside the park. Now the company wants to excavate a second open-pit mine nearby.
Although the firm received permission to begin work on the new mine from the federal government late last year, the state is poised to adopt new regulations that Canyon Resources says could kill the project. Officials of surrounding Inyo County favor the new mine, pointing out that Canyon Resources is the county's fifth-largest taxpayer.
National Park Service officials, local conservation groups and the Timbisha Shoshone tribe -- some of whose members live in the park -- say the open-pit mine, though still outside the park, would impinge on bighorn sheep habitat, poison the valley's groundwater and indelibly scar a landscape sacred to the Indians.
The new site includes 3,000 acres above the Panamint Valley at the park's west end.
Opponents of the mine expansion point out that Canyon Resources has a blemished environmental record, having been fined by Montana officials for allowing mine waste to harm water quality.
The California Wilderness Coalition recently listed the Panamint Valley as one of the state's 10 most threatened wild places, largely because of the proposed mine.
"The Panamint Valley and the range are one of the longest uninterrupted scenic views you can get in California," said Keith Hammond, a member of the coalition. "It's the backdrop of Death Valley. It's a terrible place for an open-pit mine."
The existing mine is tucked into an indentation at the foot of the mountains, so it has been largely hidden. That would not be the case with the new mine. The proposed Cecil R. Jackson mine site is five miles north of the Briggs mine and nearly 4,000 feet higher in the Panamint Mountains. If fully developed, critics say, it would amount to a sprawling industrial operation in plain sight of park visitors.
