Idaho’s passage of Senate Bill 1170 weakens cyanide mining safeguards by transferring oversight from environmental experts to lawmakers, allowing mining companies to operate with fewer safety rules despite cyanide’s well-known risks. This shift endangers Idaho’s clean water, wildlife, and outdoor heritage—resources GYC is working to protect in Kilgore, where a foreign, financially unstable company is exploring for gold. Without action, an open-pit, heap-leach cyanide mine could transform this unspoiled corner of the Centennial Mountains. 

Modern gold mining often involves stripping hillsides, crushing rock into dust, and using cyanide solutions to extract gold from low-grade ore. Although this method of heap-leaching is economically efficient, it poses substantial environmental risks. Numerous catastrophic mining failures in the U.S. in recent decades offer a cautionary tale of what could go wrong if the financially unstable foreign mining company currently exploring for gold in the Centennial Mountains above Kilgore, Idaho are permitted to mine.

Last week, a U.S. District Court sided with the U.S. Forest Service and Canadian mining company Excellon Resources in a ruling that allows Excellon to proceed with the five-year Kilgore Gold Exploration Project, greenlighting exploratory drilling that puts the wildlife, rural character, and water quality of the foothills of Idaho’s Centennial Mountains and all those downstream at serious risk.

GYC is back in court challenging the Forest Service over their most recent approval of the Kilgore Gold Exploration Project. This exploration project—and the potential for open-pit, cyanide heap-leach mining down the road—continue to present serious threats to the values that make this area special.

A recap of GYC’s 2021 successes.

An update on the fight against the Kilgore Gold Exploration Project in eastern Idaho.

An update on the Kilgore Gold Exploration Project post-comment period with the U.S. Forest Service.

On January 12, 2021 the U.S. Forest Service released a new Draft Environmental Assessment for the Kilgore Gold Exploration Project, 3-5 years of gold exploration proposed in the foothills of the Centennial Mountains near Kilgore, about 80 miles north of Idaho Falls on the Targhee National Forest.

A U.S. District Court in Boise, Idaho decided that an international mining company Excellon Resources Inc. cannot move forward with the Kilgore Project until the U.S. Forest Service issues a new decision.

Today, Judge Winmill ruled that the U.S. Forest Service must conduct further research before allowing toxic cyanide gold mining near Kilgore, Idaho, just west of Yellowstone National Park. This order temporarily halts a proposed open-pit, cyanide, heap-leach gold mine being explored by foreign mining company, Otis Gold.