Still Celebrating a BIG Win for Conglomerate Mesa! By Kayla Browne, Desert Lands Organizer After four years of defending Conglomerate Mesa from the greedy hands of K2 Gold and its subsidiary Mojave Precious Metals, we finally got a temporary win. On March 17th, K2 Gold announced in a press release an “indefinite suspension of activities at the Mojave Project.” K2 is the 11th company to threaten the Mesa since the 1980s. Conglomerate Mesa, the ancestral homelands and traditional territories of the Timbisha Shoshone and Paiute-Shoshone Tribes, is located in a remote area of the Inyo Mountains, east of Keeler, on…
Conglomerate Mesa
“Worth More Than Gold Bike Tour” April 21 – 27 By Emily Markstein and Amber Rassler: The dream for this bike tour began last winter when Amber and I spent our weekends biking the Eastern Sierra. As we wandered roads less traveled, we dreamed about integrating our love for biking with our passion for environmental advocacy and action. At the heart of our conversations was the desire to add extrinsic value and purpose to our intrinsic weekend activity. After months of conversation, we saw an opportunity to make our dreams a reality. In May of 2021, we discovered a foreign…
Great coverage on the ongoing fight to ensure permanent protection for the “Sky Island” that is Conglomerate Mesa in Southern Inyo County.
Yesterday (3/17/22) K2 Gold, a Canadian mining company doing business in Southern Inyo County, announced that it is indefinitely suspending its controversial gold drilling project on Conglomerate Mesa, public lands located on the doorstep of Death Valley National Park. Tribes and other local groups are celebrating the news given the project posed a serious threat to Conglomerate Mesa’s ecological, cultural, and recreational values. Indeed, Conglomerate Mesa is “Richer Without K2 Gold.”
Since 1996, Public News Service has pioneered a model of member-supported journalism to engage, educate and advocate for the public interest. As a national network of 37 state-based news services, NPS’s journalists are on the ground in communities throughout the country, seeking out stories on critical issues that receive too little attention and helping to lift up marginalized voices that too often go unheard. Thanks to this new partnership, stories on the public lands protection and advocacy work of Friends of the Inyo will be disseminated widely to news outlets throughout California and beyond.
The Inyo Rock Daisy is at the center of a battle for Conglomerate Mesa – and, delicate as she is, this little flower just might help environmentalists win the war.
The California Natural Resources Agency (CNRA) has released the “Draft Pathways to 30×30 Report,” a commitment to protect 30% of our state’s land and waters by 2030 to counter catastrophic biodiversity loss and mitigate the impacts of climate change. Friends of the Inyo’s goals align with those outlined in this report, and we are actively working to achieve those goals in our campaigns for Conglomerate Mesa and the Bodie Hills. We are sharing a Dec. 16 media release from a coalition of conservation partners statewide applauding the CNRA’s draft report.
Experience Dark Desert Skies at Conglomerate Mesa with Friends of the Inyo, Nov. 6 – 7 There are just a handful of spaces left for this outing that promises to be an exceptional learning experience under new-moon skies in a non-light-polluted part of the Northern Mojave Desert on Death Valley’s doorstep. Friends of the Inyo’s Dark Desert Skies Campout at Conglomerate Mesa will happen November 6-7, the weekend when Daylight Saving Time comes to an end, which means you will enjoy an extra hour of stargazing. Click on the media player button below to listen to Bryan Hatchell, FOI’s Desert…
National Hispanic Heritage Month is observed from September 15 through October 15. Friends of the Inyo is celebrating with our community by sharing the meanings of just a few Spanish-language words in the nature and conservation arena that have made their way into English. Today’s word is mesa, which in English means an isolated relatively flat-topped natural elevation usually more extensive than a butte and less extensive than a plateau, according to Merriam-Webster Online. It is a geological term that comes from the Spanish word for table. An English word sometimes also used for mesa is tableland. An example of a…
By Kathy Bancroft Lone Pine, California, the town where I was born and have lived all my life, sits in the valley by Conglomerate Mesa a mile from Death Valley National Park. I call the place Payahuunadü, meaning “land of flowing water.” The Mesa hosts a vibrant, beautiful and productive ecosystem of rare and unique desert plants, as well as culturally sensitive and archeologically significant artifacts. Returning to the Mesa, I am thrown back to my childhood, gathering pinyon nuts, listening to my relatives share our stories, and performing traditional rituals. Conglomerate Mesa is the traditional homeland of my people,…