Stopping the Kilgore Gold Exploration Project
A Quiet Corner of Greater Yellowstone
Kilgore, Idaho, is a small town just 40 miles west of Yellowstone National Park. With a population of just over 300 people, Kilgore is marked by a single, distinctive general store. The landscape around the town is rich with family farms and ranches, thick stands of aspen, and fields of wildflowers. Country roads punctuated by cattle guards cross the lowlands and in the hills above – foothills to the mighty Centennial Mountains, along the crown of which winds the Continental Divide – elk, grizzly bear, and whitebark pine make their home. Connecting all of this – from the highest of the Centennial peaks to the lush agricultural lands below – are cold, clear steams home to the famously prized and sensitive Yellowstone cutthroat trout.
It’s the water that makes this landscape what it is.
Creeks that rise as springs in the Centennial foothills feed not only the local Kilgore farms and ranches, but also the rivers and aquifers that support and sustain the mighty agricultural economy of Idaho and provide clean drinking water supplies to communities for miles and miles downstream.
Gold and Cyanide
It is in these same foothills, within the beautiful Caribou-Targhee National Forest, that Canadian mining company Excellon Resources is methodically dismantling the forested hillsides in search of gold. If Excellon finds sufficient gold resources during the exploration phase of the Kilgore Project to make extraction profitable, they plan to build an open-pit heap-leach cyanide gold mine, threatening to mar the landscape forever and pollute this quiet corner of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem with toxic industrial mining waste.
Cyanide heap-leach gold mining is a process so notorious for the damage it causes, that if the proposed mine site was located just ten miles to the north across the Montana border, it would be illegal.
The Kilgore Project’s proximity to West Camas Creek and other headwater streams of the Snake River Aquifer makes it particularly risky; a mining accident here would cause an environmental disaster that would threaten not only local water quality and wildlife habitat, but Idaho communities and agriculture for miles downstream.
Fighting for Kilgore’s Future
GYC’s Allison Michalski with the Kilgore Project’s site in the background.
The Greater Yellowstone Coalition and our partners at Idaho Conservation League and Advocates for the West, alongside concerned community members organized through the Clean Kilgore Project, have been working to fight Excellon’s Kilgore Project since 2019.
In December 2019, GYC and partners won a lawsuit against the U.S. Forest Service, which permitted the project, on the basis that the agency failed to fully examine the Kilgore Project’s potential impacts to water quality and Yellowstone cutthroat trout.
In May 2020, it was further decided that Excellon must cease additional exploration until the Forest Service issued a new decision on the environmental impacts of the project.
In January 2021, the Forest Service released a new draft environmental assessment, which GYC and partners still found lacking in substantive environmental review of water quality and trout impacts. As we worked on our analysis and recommendations for the assessment, over 3,000 concerned community members, ranchers, and public land advocates stepped up to submit comments in support of more detailed environmental review.
The Greater Yellowstone Coalition and partners continue to pursue all available legal and administrative means to protect this remote and remarkable corner of Greater Yellowstone from toxic, destructive gold mining. We are committed to preserving the landscape for the vital habitat, clean water, recreation opportunities, and distinctive character it offers.
As always, Yellowstone is more valuable than gold.
Take an aerial tour of the Kilgore Project site and learn more about this looming threat.
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