MOJAVE NATIONAL PRESERVE, Calif. — Deep in the Mojave National Preserve lies an old open pit mine where workers dug and drilled for gold and silver from the late 1800s to the 1990s. Miners are back at the Colosseum Mine today — but now they’re also looking for rare earth minerals used in advanced technologies.
The National Park Service is trying to stop it — at least until the agency can review and sign off on the activities. It claims that the mining company, Australia’s Dateline Resources Ltd., is operating the Colosseum Mine without authorization, giving federal officials little ability to minimize environmental damage in an area ecologists say is rich with rare plants.
The mining company says it has the right to work the mine under a plan its prior operators submitted to the Bureau of Land Management more than 40 years ago.
Several elected officials are backing the company against the Park Service, pointing to the national security importance of developing America’s capacity to produce rare earth minerals, which are used in smartphones, advanced weapons and electric vehicles. China dominates the market.
“Any discussion of the mine should start with its importance to national security due to its potential to contain rare earth materials,” San Bernardino County Supervisor Paul Cook said in an email. “To my knowledge, it’s the single best opportunity in the United States to bring American rare earth production online in a timely manner and help break the Chinese Communist Party’s global monopoly.”
Environmentalists are watching closely, saying the conflict will be an early indicator of the Trump administration’s policies toward commercial exploitation of public lands.
“How the Trump administration responds to the situation with Colosseum Mine will be an indicator as to how they respond to threats to our public lands in general over the next four years,” said Chance Wilcox of the National Parks Conservation Assn. “Will they favor an unauthorized foreign mine or will they better support the institution that protects America’s treasured landscapes?”
Chance Wilcox with the National Parks Conservation Assn. looks out over Clark Mountain. Ecologists say the range has the second-highest concentration of rare plants of any range in California.
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
The Colosseum Mine sits near California’s border with Nevada, about 10 miles west of Primm. Gold was first discovered there in the late 1860s and mining for it continued intermittently until 1939, later resuming in the 1980s and ‘90s.
The rocky shelf road leading to the mine winds through every layer of the Mojave. Desert tortoise habitat gives way to yucca- and cholla-studded hills, followed by stands of pinyon pine, juniper and white fir, interspersed with bursts of buckwheat, Mormon tea and desert lavender.
“Stunning — it’s one of the most spectacular spots in the Mojave,” Wilcox said on a recent afternoon as he stood on an overlook and took in views of the Clark Mountains’ lush peaks. He turned and pointed to a yawning, barbed wire-ringed pit sitting beneath denuded hills. “Without the mine, all of this would’ve looked the same.”
As gold prices soared in the 1980s, the BLM and San Bernardino County agreed to allow the mineral rights holders to resume gold mining following review under the California Environmental Quality Act and the National Environmental Policy Act.
Mining began again in late 1987 and ceased in 1992, with milling operations coming to an end the following year, according to an Environmental Protection Agency site visit report. By then, the mine was owned by Lac Minerals Ltd., which took over responsibility for groundwater inspection and monitoring required by the local water quality control board.
The Mojave National Preserve was established in 1994, transferring oversight from the BLM to the Park Service. The Park Service notified Colliseum Inc., a subsidiary of Lac Minerals, that it could continue operations until environmental reclamation was completed, according to a 1995 letter from then-field director Stanley Albright.
After that, the letter said, the operators would have to submit a new proposed plan of operations to cover a years-long monitoring phase.
Dateline Resources took over in 2021, telling shareholders that a review of U.S. Geological Service data had revealed radiometric anomalies on the southern end of its mining claims suggesting the presence of rare earth elements.
The anomalies were similar to those documented at the nearby Mountain Pass Rare Earth Mine, which is the only domestic producer of rare earth elements and provides about 16% of the world’s supply, the release noted.
While the company would focus primarily on the potential for gold at the mine, it would also include rare earth elements in its planned exploration program, it announced.
The National Park Service declined to make officials available for an interview or to provide information about its discussions with the mine owners. The agency said in a statement that it is working with the Department of the Interior and the mine owners to ensure that laws are followed and the resources of the Mojave National Preserve are protected.
But hundreds of pages of letters and emails exchanged by park officials, the mine owners, their legal representatives, and county and federal officials, released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the National Parks Conservation Assn. and shared with The Times, reveal a dispute dating back several years.
The National Park Service’s first contact with Dateline took place in May of 2022, when a law enforcement ranger encountered a contractor demobilizing a diamond-core drilling rig from the mine, according to correspondence from park officials. The contractor told the Park Service he’d been conducting an exploratory drilling operation for Dateline subsidiary Colosseum Rare Metals, the correspondence states.
The National Park Service and owners of the Colosseum Mine in San Bernardino County have been involved in a years-long dispute.
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Park Service staff later inspected the road leading to the mine and found damage from the unpermitted movement of equipment and unauthorized roadwork, according to letters from park officials. Heavy earthmoving equipment had been driven off road, large perennial shrubs were uprooted and an acre under active restoration was razed by bulldozer, the letters state.
That June, the preserve’s then-superintendent, Mike Gauthier, notified Dateline managing director Stephen Baghdadi that the mine was operating without authorization. Gauthier demanded that the company cease work until it submitted an operations plan to the Park Service and won the agency’s approval. This would typically give the Park Service the opportunity to analyze the environmental effects of the proposed work and add terms and conditions to conserve park resources.
A lawyer representing the company, Kerry Shapiro, responded in a November 2022 letter saying the Park Service had no basis to require permits or a new plan of operations because the activities were already authorized under existing approvals.
Shapiro said the mine would seek to restart mineral extraction activities, which were consistent with the plan for the mine approved by the BLM in 1985. The Park Service authorized that plan 10 years later when it told the mine’s prior owners that they could continue existing operations until reclamation was complete, wrote Shapiro, of the law firm Jeffer Mangels Butler & Mitchell.
A warning sign at the Colosseum Mine in San Bernardino County.
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
A regional NPS official, Frank Lands, said in a February 2023 response to Shapiro that the 1995 temporary authorization was intended to cover just a short period so that closure of the mine could be completed. That 2023 letter explicitly revoked the authorization and ordered Colosseum Rare Metals to cease and desist any activities other than water quality monitoring.
Shapiro said in a statement that Colosseum has been working for years to resolve what it feels are a series of misunderstandings by the Park Service, but that the agency’s files on the mine were destroyed by water damage, hampering these efforts.
“Nevertheless, Colosseum is continuing to work to resolve these misunderstandings in its ongoing efforts in connection with this important mine site,” he said.
In March of 2023, a Park Service law enforcement ranger encountered Baghdadi and a contractor on the road to the mine supervising a bulldozer and backhoe that were performing unpermitted roadwork, according to a letter the preserve’s then-acting superintendent, Kelly Fuhrmann, sent to Cook, the county supervisor. The ranger told them to stop work and remove the equipment but returned the next day to find the work had gone forward, destroying hundreds of perennial plants, the letter states.
The Park Service eventually sent the mine operators and two contractors a $213,387 bill for costs and damages stemming from the incident, along with the roadwork allegedly performed the previous May. The parties met at least once to discuss settlement, but no agreement has been reached.
Colosseum is actively disputing the allegations but does not comment on ongoing administrative proceedings, Shapiro said.
U.S. Rep. Jay Obernolte (R-Hesperia) and San Bernardino County Supervisors Dawn Rowe and Cook wrote letters in 2023 to the Park Service urging the agency to let the mine continue operating.
In a statement provided to The Times, Cook wrote that the Colosseum Mine has protected mining rights that were established long before the Park Service had any jurisdiction over the land.
“From my vantage point, the NPS actions over the past several years to deny rights at Colosseum Mine amount to unnecessary agency overreach,” Cook wrote.
Rep. Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael) said he disagreed with that legal analysis and that the mine operators should obtain approval from the Park Service. The national parks system is an intergenerational trust, and to the extent that extractive uses are allowed, there needs to be oversight to ensure such uses are sustainable, he said.
“We don’t hold these public lands so that our corporate pals can just monetize them and wreck them permanently,” he said.
Mining companies often tout the potential presence of rare earth elements to justify destructive practices, Huffman added. He pointed to the proposed Pebble Mine in Alaska, which was scrapped in 2023 after the EPA determined its waste would harm salmon fishery areas in the Bristol Bay watershed.
Wilcox of the National Parks Conservation Assn. said environmentalists are not only concerned that mining operations will damage the ecosystem, but that the disregard for the permitting and review process will also pave the way for others to do the same, particularly during a presidential administration that’s sympathetic to industry.
“Essentially, this mine is managing the destruction of one of the largest units in our national parks system, which are the crown jewels of America,” Wilcox said. “We’ve never seen anything like this.”
The Clark Mountains in San Bernardino County hold a wealth of rare plants, ecologists say.
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
The Clark mountain range is one of California’s most botanically important areas, said Jim Andre, director of UC Riverside’s Granite Mountains Desert Research Center. It’s estimated to harbor the second-highest density of rare plants of any of the state’s mountain ranges, second only to the New York Mountains directly to its south, he said.
In all, about 65 plant species in the Clark Mountains are ranked as rare by the California Native Plant Society, and at least 41 of them are protected under CEQA, Andre said. By comparison, the entirety of Joshua Tree National Park — which is nearly 20 times larger — has just 45 listed plant species, he said.
Andre estimates that at least half of the mountain range’s rare plant species are directly or indirectly affected by the mining activities at Colosseum.
These plants tend to support specific, sometimes rare species of pollinators like bees, hummingbirds, butterflies and moths, Andre said. “They’re not just prized luxury items, they’re actually a functional part of the ecosystem,” he said.
And the eastern Mojave Desert is still a frontier for species discovery, meaning that scientists don’t actually have a full picture of what could be lost, he said.
“What’s concerning to me about the Colosseum Mine is that it doesn’t seem to be following a regulatory process that would provide an opportunity or requirement to even go out and do preconstruction surveys,” he said. “That’s the mystery of the activities we’re seeing right now, is that they seem to be shrugging off the due process … and it’s happening within a national park, which is kind of astounding.”
