Boom or Bust? : Can the ghost town of Bodie survive another gold rush? Mining companies say yes; opponents say no.

Mark Whitehead’s Ford Bronco comes to a halt atop Conway Summit. Actually, Whitehead’s been forced to stop his four-wheel drive by a CalTrans road crew. There is a half-mile of stalled traffic, and he is about to be late for his sons’ Little League game.

He doesn’t complain; rather he switches off the engine, lights a cigarette and explains that CalTrans is widening Highway 395 to four lanes at the summit. A model of patience, Whitehead looks out the window at the green meadows, snowcapped Sierra Nevadas and dazzling skies of God’s country. He watches two yellow bulldozers eat the hill.

Suddenly he erupts:

“Look what’s going on on that hillside! Look at the dust. Why isn’t somebody howling about the destruction being done? See that black smoke going out of that diesel--have they got permits from Air Quality?

“Why do I have to deal with it in the mine? We seem to be singled out for special treatment.”

He is being sarcastic.

Whitehead is project manager for Bodie Consolidated Mining Co., a subsidiary of the Vancouver-based Galactic Resources, Ltd. An energetic, restless man, he has been “sitting here doing nothing” at his Bridgeport office for the past 18 months, forced to a halt, he says, by “preservationist extremists or people who have no room for compromise or balance.

“I’m not a mining fanatic. I’m a fanatic for balance. There is a place for minerals in our society.”

There is gold in these hills. At least 1 million ounces, with some guesses reaching skyward to 40 million.

The problem is that the hills surround Bodie State Historic Park. Thirteen miles off Highway 395, Bodie is a gold-mining ghost town, one of the best preserved in the West and a site that draws close to 200,000 visitors a year.

Bodie owes its existence to gold mining. There are those who think renewed mining would be another chapter in Bodie’s life and those who are convinced mining would be its death. People are increasingly polarized, but they all say they love Bodie and want no harm to come to it.

Nothing infuriates Whitehead and his supporters more than assertions his company plans to start up a full-scale mining operation. All Bodie Consolidated wants to do, he insists, is continue exploration. Only when that is complete will it decide whether to propose a mining project.

And if it does, Whitehead is convinced that a mining operation will be compatible with the ghost town.

Galactic’s preliminary plans referred to an open pit mine, but Whitehead insists any such pits would be completely out of sight from Bodie. And the probable 10 to 12 years of operation would be an economic boon to Mono County.

Mine foes say blasting, heavy equipment and trucks will shake or destroy the fragile buildings; dust will ruin the pristine air; cyanide will threaten the flora and fauna; inevitable noise and eyesores will ruin the whole “Bodie experience.”

Donna Pozzi, who chairs the Save Bodie! Committee of the California State Park Rangers Assn., testified in May before a Congressional subcommittee on behalf of the Bodie Protection Act, which would remove 6,000 acres of public lands around Bodie from new mining claims. Valid private claims would be unaffected.

“We, as park professionals, have faced a great challenge in working to save Bodie from the elements, to slow down the ravages of time and the processes of nature,” she said. “We believe the demise of Bodie would be accelerated by man’s actions if a modern mine went into operation in the Bodie Bowl.”

South of Bodie, in Mammoth Lakes--a town that depends on tourism--Nancy Whitmore and Dan Hayden, of the Eastern Sierra Citizens for the Protection of Bodie, are of similar minds.

“We are neither for nor against gold mining. We are against gold mining in Bodie,” Whitmore says. “You take your position. You’re for the history or you’re for the progress.” She discounts the supposed economic benefits mining would bring to the community: “It could wind up costing the taxpayer.”

She and Hayden itemize: a temporary increased pressure on the schools, police, grocery stores, the infrastructure; roughneck miners living in mobile homes; the possible loss of a tourist attraction, followed by the eventual disappearance of most miners.

“That’s why there’s a ghost town,” Hayden says.

“Workers are imported. They move out. There’s a ghost town. It was boom and bust 100 years ago, and it’s going to be boom and bust today.”

The first 10 miles of the road to Bodie are paved; the last three are a hard dirt washboard. The approach is a vast expanse of sage-covered desert hills, patched with irises and white prickly poppies. Herds of sheep and cattle from nearby ranches graze in the low meadows, an occasional mule deer darts by, and pika, tiny rabbit look-alikes, scamper in the rocks.

The road bends and suddenly you glimpse Bodie in the distance.

About 120 structures, or about 5% of the town at its heyday, have withstood fire, the elements and vandals. When people talk of “the Bodie experience,” they mean the silence, isolation, the eerie sense of removal from the 20th Century--a history cut short.

Waterman S. Bodey discovered gold here in 1859, but it was not until 1874 that miners hit the bonanza. By 1877 the gold rush was on.

The boom lasted just four years. Exploration and assessment continued, as did small-scale mining operations and occasional comebacks, such as the 1890s with the coming of electricity and the cyanide extraction process.

“There has been uninterrupted mining and exploration here for the past 135 years,” Whitehead stresses.

Mining techniques and gold prices alternately spurred or stymied operations. “What was waste at $20 an ounce was ore at $35 an ounce,” he explains. His company’s interest soared in 1988 when gold was at $434; it has hovered just under $350 this year.

Bodie was on its way to being a ghost town by the 1930s. From the look of the place today, many left in a hurry--abandoning clothes on pegs, dishes in the cupboards, stock on store shelves, poker chips on the gambling tables.

One early settler, James S. Cain, bought a bank at the turn of the century and started buying up the town. His J. S. Cain Co. also acquired many mining claims and leased them out. Galactic now holds those leases.

The Cain family, however, remains involved.

Walter Cain, born in 1917 and a grandson to J.S., moved at age 9 from Bodie to Bridgeport and remains there today.

Two years ago, he went back inside his old home: “I saw the room where I had my feather bed,” he says. “It was all familiar.”

After World War II, Cain says, people started coming to see Bodie, and his family watched strangers “walk in and literally cart off the place.”

The company hired a watchman to protect Bodie, he says, but approached the Parks Department about taking it over. In 1962, the state bought the 500-acre town site and its contents. J. S. Cain Co. held onto about 500 adjacent acres, site of most of the patented claims, and made sure that one road through town permitted ingress and egress for possible future mining.

Thousands of surrounding acres, with unpatented mining claims, are public lands administered by the Bureau of Land Management.

Gold-mining has changed. No longer is it old-timers panning for nuggets in streams or young men with handlebar mustaches disappearing into tunnels with picks and shovels.

Today the most widely used and economical way to mine gold is by open-pit, heap-leach mining. The process, perfected about 15 years ago, involves tons of crushed ore dug from open pits, stacked on a leach pad and doused with a cyanide solution that attracts the specks of gold.

Brad Sturdivant, Bodie’s supervising ranger, has lived here since 1983 and says he would hate to see such an operation come to Bodie:

“There’s always been some activity here. Mark is right about that, but nothing has ever been on the scale or scope that they have in mind. After World War II, it’s not been mining per se but mostly exploration.”

In 1988, Galactic bought Homestake Mining of California’s mineral interests in 550 acres of private lands (mostly those of the J. S. Cain Co.) and several thousand acres of public lands. Galactic explored, drilled and assayed, but when the company requested an additional permit from Mono County in 1990 to drill 400 to 1,000 test holes, it hit a roadblock.

Because of public uproar and controversy, the county required Galactic to pay for an Environmental Impact Report, an unusual step for exploration, before drilling.

After many delays, the EIR draft has reached Mono County’s planning office. A lengthy and involved process lies ahead before exploration can begin. If Galactic then wants to mine, another proposal and EIR are necessary.

In the meantime, H. R. 4370, the Bodie Protection Act, has passed from committee and is now before the U. S. House of Representatives.

People here can argue forever about the bill’s effect. To Walter Cain, a director of the J. S. Cain Co., which stands to make millions from renewed mining, the issue is not about protecting Bodie: “It’s to stop mining. With the controls that exist now, at all levels, I fail to see how these terrible things would happen to Bodie.”

Nancy Whitmore says her group wants “to close all the doors where there could be a violation of the historical town of Bodie.” And they want the doors closed now. “We can’t wait until after the fact when it’s too damn late. I don’t want to take a group of people to Bodie and say, ‘Look what happened.’ ”

Brad Sturdivant stops his vehicle at a bend in the road above Bodie. It is his day off, but the ranger is on a busman’s holiday, telling a visitor, “Your experience starts here of what is supposed to be a ghost town.”

Sturdivant points out Main Street, the cemetery and in the distance, the bonanza zone: Standard Hill, Bodie Bluff and, on the other side of town, Silver Hill, where “the first placer gold was discovered,” he says.

Two days earlier, Mark Whitehead had stopped at the same spot.

Nodding toward Standard Hill and Bodie Bluff, Whitehead said, “What you’re seeing is an expression of gold mining--an expression of the surface that was mined and has produced 10 million ounces of gold and 25 million ounces of silver in recorded production.”

Whitehead, 45, and Sturdivant, 43, are permanently bronzed outdoorsmen and, while their emphases certainly differ, both seem in love with the vista they describe.

“I think Bodie is a real neat place,” Whitehead says. “ No one should destroy it. Not Galactic, not the park rangers, not anyone.” He is convinced an active mine could add to Bodie’s appeal as a tourist attraction, and says “I’m an environmentalist. It’s why the heck I’m in this--being outside.”

A geologist with a flare for the dramatic, Whitehead can drive behind Standard Hill--private property where his company has interests--and casually announce, “We just rode over one million ounces of gold.” He walks across the bluff, lovingly picks up a veined rock and goes back to the Ice Age with its story.

A favorite game of his is to have visitors guess where Galactic drilled holes in 1989. He makes his point about reclamation. It is virtually impossible to tell: “I think we’re pretty doggone sensitive to these things.”

Sturdivant tells about the hawks, horned owls and bald eagles, antelope and occasional mountain lions that have been known to come around: “I see more wildlife here than I’ve ever seen in the Sierra.”

He walks around the ghost town, answering tourists’ questions, and shows the preservation work.

He unlocks the old schoolhouse and goes to an interior room where the rangers try, in their “spare time,” to inventory anything left by former residents. He tells the lore: the little girl who when leaving Tonopah, Nev., wrote in her diary, “Goodbye God, we’re going to Bodie”; the outlaws who inspired the “Bad Man From Bodie” legend; Bridgeport old-timers who tell of boyhoods in Bodie when they skied down the hill to school during harsh winters.

“Our entire job is protecting the park, from the inside and outside,” Sturdivant says. “Galactic keeps saying, ‘We won’t do anything to hurt Bodie.’ Well, sure. Not on purpose. They did not plan on a cyanide leak at Summitville either.”

Galactic owns a mine in Summitville, Col., where federal and state agencies have accused the company of violations stemming from cyanide leaks into natural waterways.

Galactic contends it inherited the problem from previous owners, but the company has paid stiff penalties, anticipates further high costs and is engaged in reclamation and closure efforts there. It has caused sufficient problems that Galactic’s 1991 annual report announces its intent to redirect itself outside North America, taking advantage of “lower costs and more reasonable environmental requirements.”

While it continues Mono County exploration plans, Galactic has put its Bodie leases up for sale. There have been no takers.

Bill Reid is chairman of the Mono County Board of Supervisors. Tall and mannerly, he wears denims and cowboy boots to the office and looks more like a Sierra native than the displaced New Jerseyite he is.

Bodie is in his district and Reid’s language is full of phrases--”private property,” “local control,” “Constitutional rights”--that key his arguments against passage of H. R. 4370.

“I have no preconceived notions whether Bodie should be mined or not,” he says. “I say the environmental mechanisms are in place. Let’s allow the system to work. The mining company hasn’t even presented a proposal. If a proposal comes to us, let’s evaluate it on its face.”

He is open to mining, but says he’s committed to protecting Bodie.

Three other supervisors agree. The sole opposition is Andrea Mead Lawrence of Mammoth Lakes. Lawrence, a 1952 Olympics double gold medalist in skiing, supports the legislation, opposes further exploration and says mining and the ghost town are incompatible.

“If you’re saying, ‘you can have it both ways,’ and that implies an open pit--you cannot,” she says. “There are some who believe, ‘What the hell, it always was a mine.’ There’s a whole value system at stake. I come in from a different angle.”

Lawrence scoffs at “it’s only exploration” protestations: “You’re going to let them come in; let them find the mother lode, and then you’re going to tell them, ‘You can’t put a mine here?’ Come on.”

Area residents are also divided.

Coy Ziglar “sells fishhooks” at his sporting goods store on Bridgeport’s main street and occasionally minds his wife’s adjoining boutique. He thinks mining should be allowed as long as “you don’t tear it up, contaminate the stream and you put the soil back. I know you can do it.”

Studying his customer for a moment, he says, “You have gold on your hand. I have gold on my hand. We can buy it from Africa or we can go up there in the hills and get it.”

Directly across the street at Ken’s Sporting Goods, proprietor Rick Rockel takes a break from a morning of selling fishing licenses and line to explain his support of H. R. 4370:

“I cannot put myself in the hands of the Board of Supervisors on this issue. . . . The temptation would be too much for them. We would make more money, sure, but if we wanted to make more money, we shouldn’t be living in Bridgeport. . . .

“What are you willing to trade off? I am not willing to trade off Bodie for more money.

“You can always make more money. You cannot always make Bodie.”