The road to Buckhorn Mountain is an idyll of the American West. As it climbs out of the arid Okanogan River valley in north-central Washington state, the route twists through remote fields of oats and alfalfa, fields that slope fetchingly upward to meet the coniferous forests of higher elevations. Copses of quaking aspen grow in hollows between the fields. Despite the cultivation, the place exudes emptiness and wildness. Residents see moose from time to time, and the area is occasionally visited by wolves and grizzly bears.

Buckhorn Mountain rises to the east, just a few miles south of the Canada border, a rounded summit providing an out-of-scale backdrop to the hamlet of Chesaw. The fact that it is still standing, largely unmolested, has much to do with the presence of David Kliegman, who lives nearby in a hand-fashioned home next to a wooded brook.

Nine years ago, Kliegman learned that a Texas mining corporation had plans to mine the gold ore that lies within Buckhorn Mountain. Battle Mountain Gold Company planned to take the top off the mountain, mingle the rock with cyanide and, over the course of eight years, extract what the company estimated would be about fifty tons of gold. The site, once it was mined out, would require perpetual treatment through a complex scheme of catching water runoff in ditches, cleansing it in an artificial pond, and then channeling the water through pipes running through the interior of the mountain that would discharge into creeks below.

Kliegman, appalled, began investigating options to derail the company’s plans. Environmentalists familiar with the might of the mining industry on federal lands told him to forget it. The 1872 Mining Law—the legislation that most directly addresses public lands mining—gives companies an ironclad right to mine on federal territory. (The bulk of the land that Battle Mountain Gold would mine is under U.S. Forest Service management.)

“It was extremely frustrating,” Kliegman says. “But it was never an option to us that this mine could go in. We just totally believed we could and would stop it.”

The company originally hoped to begin mining in 1993. Now it is 2000, and as Kliegman strolls through a forest of Douglas-fir and larch near Buckhorn’s summit, the mountain is quiet. A set of fresh bear tracks spans a late spring snowbank. The only sound is a whisper of wind moving through the treetops. No gold has been mined here, and due to a landmark ruling by a state hearings board earlier this year, it is unlikely that any will be mined in the near future.

As improbable as it seemed nine years ago, the battle of Buckhorn Mountain was won by conservationists.

If the victory holds—company officials vow to fight on—it will mark the first time that opponents have thwarted industry’s best efforts to push through a major open-pit mine on federal land. Other mines have been stopped, but only through government buyouts or after declines in economic conditions prompted companies to reconsider their plans.

The tale of how Kliegman and his cohorts managed to stop the mine stands as a case study of effective grassroots environmental activism. Their campaign has been unorthodox and dogged and has set precedents that could substantially affect other mining proposals on public lands. “If it weren’t for people like Dave Kliegman, that mine would have been up and running years ago,” says Alan Septoff of the Washington, D.C.Ðbased Mineral Policy Center, which lobbies for mining reform. “Community-level folks have never done stuff like this before.”

Like many remote corners of the West where local economies hinge on the wavering prospects of logging, farming, grazing and mining, Okanogan County is a study in contrasts, its residents divided by competing visions of what should be done with the federally managed land that surrounds their small communities. In the late nineteenth century, discovery of gold in the region sparked a short-lived mining boom that left behind hand-hacked holes that yawn blackly from mountainsides and memories of freewheeling boomtowns. When the gold petered out, attention turned to timber and to agriculture, especially apple-growing along the Okanogan River. In recent years, those industries, too, have suffered. Okanogan County’s unemployment rate stands at 9 percent, nearly double the overall Washington state rate of 4.7 percent.

In the town of Tonasket, a sign reading “This Household Supported by Timber Dollars” is posted in front of a modest home just a few blocks from the local co-op store, where anti-mining bumper stickers next to health food bins declare that “Pure Water Is More Precious Than Gold.”

“The newcomers are against the mine, and the old-timers are for it,” says Wilbur “Web” Hallauer, who for sixty-four years has lived in the town of Oroville, a name derived from the Spanish word for gold. “We had an invasion of young idealists that started about thirty years ago. They could buy a twenty-acre tract for $2,000 and they could build a shack and dig a hole for a privy. I call them modern Luddites.”

According to Hallauer and other long-time Okanogan County residents who staunchly support Battle Mountain Gold, Kliegman fits the stereotype to a T.

Kliegman, an accomplished woodworker who speaks deliberately and softly and wears his hair in a ponytail, acknowledges that he came to Okanogan County in part because land was affordable. In 1980, expecting a child, he and his wife, Hanna, moved to Okanogan County from Oregon, where they worked as organic farmers. He pieced together a living, salvaging firewood from piles of logging slash, contracting with the Forest Service to clear brush from trails and taking other odd jobs. They raised two children and eventually both took jobs with the local school district, she as a computer specialist and he as a physical therapist for children with disabilities.

Kliegman had been involved in forest advocacy work in Oregon, an interest that he brought with him to Okanogan County. He worked on appeals to Forest Service timber sales and was spurred to further action after the agency sanctioned a large clear-cut on the slopes of Mount Bonaparte behind his home.

He first heard of Battle Mountain Gold’s plans nine years ago, from a neighbor who asked him if he knew what had been done on Buckhorn Mountain. Kliegman hiked up to the mountain’s north slope and found a clear-cut crisscrossed by a tight network of roads that the company built to sample ore in the mountain’s interior. Kliegman knew that the area encompassed important wildlife habitat and that the Okanogan National Forest management plan allowed only one mile of road per square mile of land in the area.

“When I asked the Forest Service about it, they said, ÔThose aren’t roads, those are drill pads,’” Kliegman says. “Thirty-three miles of interconnected Ôdrill pads.’ That’s when I got involved in the mine.”

Kliegman and others formed a group, the Okanogan Highlands Alliance, to fight the project, which Battle Mountain Gold called the Crown Jewel Mine. Their first challenge was to try to grasp exactly what the company was proposing.

“We felt very much like a Third World country,” says Judy Elven, who has lived near Buckhorn Mountain for thirty years and was involved with the alliance from the beginning. “The company came in and spread their influence around, dropping money here and there, getting politicians in their back pocket.”

Members of the fledgling group enlisted the help of well-established environmental groups in the Seattle area, including the Washington Environmental Council and the Washington Wilderness Coalition, as well as the Mineral Policy Center. They secured grants and began to file appeals and hired a Seattle law firm that was also fighting a major ski resort proposed for the nearby Methow Valley.

At the same time, mine opponents took as high a profile as possible, voicing their concerns in a variety of ways—at public meetings, in newspaper advertisements, in letters to community leaders. They printed T-shirts and bumper stickers, they ordered matchbooks that said “Strike the Mining Law of 1872,” they produced and sold audio cassettes featuring anti-mining folksongs written by local musicians, with proceeds going to the mine fight. “All along, I’ve thought of this as a campaign,” Kliegman says. “Part of our campaign was to create an impression that this thing wasn’t inevitable. So we did the ads; we rented billboard space. We created a presence.”

The pace of the project began to slow. In the face of intensifying public interest, the Forest Service, an agency whose official mission includes the “exploration, development, and production of mineral and energy resources,” held numerous public meetings as it prepared an environmental impact statement for the project. Months passed, and then years. In March 1995, the three members of the Okanogan County Board of Commissioners, all mine supporters, signed a “Procrastination Award,” which they presented to federal and state officials—earned, they said, because release of the draft environmental impact statement had been delayed six times since 1992.

Kliegman and his supporters worked the federal side of the proposal, but realized early on that their best hope rested with state officials who would ultimately decide whether the project complied with water quality laws.

In November of 1994, Battle Mountain Gold announced it was applying for water rights for the project. The state Department of Ecology received more than seventy letters opposing the permits, including ones from officials in Canada, where some of the water from Buckhorn Mountain flows, and also from the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, which rely in part on water that springs from the mountain. “For about a month of the year or more, we have to ration our water,” says Steven Iukes Sr., a Colville tribal elder. “We thought the mine would only make that worse.”

Suddenly, the company was facing opposition not only from a handful of residents who lived near Buckhorn Mountain but also from American Indian tribes, from well-funded environmental groups, from officials in Canada, from holders of water rights—valuable commodities in a relatively arid region.

Battle Mountain Gold officials maintained then—as they do now—that their proposal is environmentally sound and that it is supported by the majority of Okanogan County residents, who recognize the need for the 145 relatively high-paying full-time jobs that the mine would bring. “This is an excellent deposit, and we’ve always believed we can develop it in an environmentally responsible fashion,” says Les Van Dyke, the company’s director of investor relations. “There has always been tremendous support for this project on the part of the community.”

The climate grew more tense. Elven, who was then president of the Okanogan Highlands Alliance, says she came home one day to find that someone had left a death threat on her telephone answering machine. “If you voice yourself here, you immediately get put into a category,” she says. “Your job can be in jeopardy, all kinds of things can happen to you. So a lot of people who were against the mine kept silent.”

In 1997, the Forest Service released its final environmental impact statement, calling for the project to move forward. Later that year, the state Department of Ecology approved the company’s water rights applications. The project seemed back on track.

Over the following months, the company secured more permits for the operation. Then, in March 1999, when the mine’s opening seemed imminent, the Clinton administration delivered a bombshell. Two years earlier, the Department of Interior’s top attorney, John Leshy, had issued an opinion citing a little-known passage in the 1872 Mining Law. That provision stated that mill sites at mining operations are limited to five acres. (Mill sites are areas where mining companies store tailings and where workers extract minerals from ore.)

Opponents of the mine knew about the provision—and they knew that Battle Mountain Gold needed 100 times that much space for its mill site. They wrote to administration officials, urging them to stop the mine on grounds that it violated the mill site provision. The administration did just that on March 25, 1999, rejecting the mine outright in a decision signed by top administration officials.

It marked the first time the mill site provision had ever been used to stop a mine. Battle Mountain Gold officials and their supporters were livid. But they had an ace in the hole.

Six weeks later, Washington’s senior senator, Slade Gorton, attached a rider to an emergency spending bill designed to finance the U.S. military operation in Kosovo and the Hurricane Mitch relief effort in Central America. The rider specifically exempted the Crown Jewel Mine from the mill site provision. The Seattle press reported that the language was finalized after midnight as Gorton knelt at a table, flanked by mining lobbyists. Despite vocal protests from lawmakers, the legislation passed, forcing the administration to once again approve the mine.

Gorton said the rider was a matter of fairness. Battle Mountain Gold had spent $80 million on its effort to open the mine and had secured some fifty permits. It was “immoral,” he said, for unelected bureaucrats to overturn the mine now. But the Republican senator paid a political price for his action. The New York Times called the rider “particularly outrageous.” “Who the heck does he think elected him, Texans?” one Seattle resident wrote in what was a spate of letters that ran in the city’s two daily newspapers. “Next he will come back to Washington wearing a 10-gallon hat.”

Kliegman says the days following Gorton’s action were the darkest for mine opponents.

“That was pretty rough,” he says. “But even when the rider went through, we said, ÔOK, we’ll defeat this thing on its technical demerits.’”

The opponents’ best hope for doing so was a Washington state commission called the Pollution Control Hearings Board, the body charged with adjudicating appeals to Department of Ecology decisions. “We knew all along that this case was ultimately going to hinge on water issues,” says David Mann, a Seattle attorney representing the Okanogan Highlands Alliance. “This was finally the test of that.”

Last September, the board conducted a four-day trial to consider whether Battle Mountain Gold’s mining plans would violate state water quality standards. Mann and two other attorneys for the opponents presented what they contended was clear evidence that those standards would be violated. Attorneys for the company and for the state Department of Ecology, which had signed off on the plans, argued the company’s plans were sound.

The three members of the hearings board were attentive, engaged—and stone-faced. Four months passed, and those involved in the case awaited the board’s decision with growing anticipation. Finally, on January 19, the board released its findings, determining that the mine would violate water quality standards. The board declared that Battle Mountain Gold’s mitigation plans were “highly speculative and uncertain,” that its studies suffered “from serious omissions and flaws.” The decision overturned the Department of Ecology ruling in favor of Battle Mountain Gold, effectively killing the Crown Jewel Mine.

Mann, who has worked on the case since 1991, was on the telephone with another client when he learned of the ruling. When he heard whooping from colleagues down the hall, he told the client he’d have to call back. Then he read the board’s decision, which was posted on the World Wide Web.

“That was the top moment in my career,” he says.

And so the battle over Buckhorn Mountain stands, at least for now.

Battle Mountain Gold officials have appealed the Pollution Control Hearings Board ruling in Okanogan County Superior Court. Their prospects, however, seem dim, especially after their erstwhile ally, the state Department of Ecology, decided not to appeal the board’s decision. The company says it will fight on, even though it has officially written off its investment of $80 million, a move that Van Dyke dismisses as “an accounting issue.”

Gorton, whose rider raised the ire of environmentalists and constituents alike, is running for reelection. One of his opponents, former U.S. Representative Maria Cantwell, recently chartered a plane to take reporters to Buckhorn Mountain, where she railed against Gorton’s rider. The Sierra Club, as well as state tribal groups, have announced plans for a well-financed ad campaign that will seek to unseat Gorton on the basis of his environmental record, including his action on behalf of Battle Mountain Gold.

Gorton is distancing himself from the mine and from his middle-of-the-night rider.

“Basically, that was something that the people from Okanogan County wanted—they came to Slade, he didn’t seek them out,” Gorton spokeswoman Megan Frey says. “There really isn’t anything Slade can do now.”

The residents of Okanogan County seem weary of the issue after nearly a decade of high-profile and often acrimonious debate. Those who support the mine, including some of the county’s most senior and most powerful residents, are bitter because a project that they believe would bring jobs and a modicum of prosperity has been derailed by opponents they perceive as outsiders.

Bob Hirst, a county commissioner who has lived in Okanogan County for all of his seventy-four years, says he knows who to blame. “Environmentalists—the same people who have stopped all logging,” he says. “These are people who have moved here from other places. I think they work for the Sierra Club.”

Those who have fought the Buckhorn Mountain mine say that their battle holds broader ramifications for mining proposals on federal lands.

Despite Gorton’s rider, the five-acre mill site provision remains on the books and could prove a significant hindrance to future open-pit mining proposals on public lands. (The provision survived an attempt by congressional Republicans to kill it last year, although it was weakened. Mining supporters were able to exempt pending mining proposals and ongoing operations from the five-acre limit.)

In May, attorneys for the Okanogan Highlands Alliance and other groups filed a protest with the government saying Battle Mountain Gold violated another little-noticed provision of the 1872 Mining Law that addresses the amount of land a company can acquire for any one mining claim. That challenge, too, could have impacts for other mines.

Finally, mine opponents say, the fight against Battle Mountain Gold demonstrates that the most effective way to stop mining proposals on federal land may be to fight them at the state level rather than the federal level—a strategy that has not been widely used.

“I hope what it’s done is give a heads-up to others,” Mann says. “States have always controlled water rights and water quality issues. I think a lot of other states could do the same thing if they wanted to.”

Perhaps the most lasting legacy of Buckhorn Mountain, though, is more fundamental. For the first time, industry’s perfect record for siting large-scale mines on federal land has been tarnished.

“It certainly has a symbolic element,” says Roger Flynn, executive director of the Colorado-based Western Mining Action Project and one of the attorneys who fought Battle Mountain Gold’s plans. “The absolute deference to the mining industry that we’ve seen in the past is starting to change. The industry is on notice now that every big mine gets challenged.”

Kliegman is reluctant to claim victory.

“As long as there’s gold in the ground, and as long as there’s greed, someone’s going to want to get at it,” he says. “Eternal vigilance.”