BEATTY — In one of the nation’s most remote deserts, Chloe Novak has a front-row seat to what she says is an extinction crisis of Southern Nevada’s rare plants.

Novak, a master’s student at the California Botanic Garden, rarely finds herself in California these days. Instead, she’s racing against time to catalog rare plants in Nye County, and she said the threats to plant life keep mounting.

On an off-road drive through a proposed gold mine, the North Bullfrog Mine, she pointed to two mountain peaks that may soon be imploded to become an open pit. Later, she passed through the so-called Arthur deposit, a project area larger than the size of San Francisco, where the hunt for gold continues.

“This has been my office for the past two years,” Novak said. “I’m trying to see all the plants before they’re gone.”

She might not have that much time left.

About 120 miles northwest of Las Vegas is the unincorporated town of Beatty that proudly claims its identity as the gateway to Death Valley National Park. Today, in addition to encompassing the headwaters of what some consider one of America’s most endangered rivers, it is squarely at the heart of a mineral revolution that could put Beatty on the map again.

AngloGold Ashanti, a multinational mining company originally from South Africa, is moving through the federal permitting process for the North Bullfrog Mine, which could have wide-reaching implications for the desert enclave of Beatty, wholly dependent on groundwater and springs connected to the imperiled Amargosa River system for its water supply.

Not everyone is on board.

In Beatty, the company says it has identified at least 6.1 million ounces of gold — more than the nation produces each year and worth about $20 billion at current market value, which has soared over the past decade.

North Bullfrog is the first step toward transforming Beatty again into a multigenerational mining town, said Nick Fouche, the company’s senior vice president of Nevada projects, in an interview.

“The North Bullfrog gives us the chance to actually demonstrate it, and say, ‘Look, AngloGold is a responsible operator,’” Fouche said. “It’s not an operator that is fly-by-night, and it’s here for the long term.”

‘Boom and bust’

Mining is nothing new for Beatty and the surrounding area of what once comprised the thriving Bullfrog Mining District.

Though nicknamed the Silver State for the role its silver played in the Civil War, Nevada is much more of a gold state. In 2016, the Nevada Mining Association said that if the state were a country, it would be the fourth-highest gold-producing country in the world.

Two prospectors struck gold in 1904, giving rise to a district that attracted thousands of residents and saw the construction of an opera house, railroads, banks and newspapers. The short-lived boom collapsed by the 1910s, something historians credit to over-speculation and the Panic of 1907, a financial crisis after which little funding remained for speculative mining.

Now deserted ghost towns, the main hubs for mining in the early 1900s were Bullfrog and Rhyolite. Railroads passed through Beatty, making it a major transportation hub — the key to its eventual survival.

“It ended up being briefly spectacular,” said Eric Nystrom, a University of Nevada, Reno, professor of mining history. “But to make a mine live a long time, you have to have much more minerals in it, and a lot of those surface deposits didn’t really do that at the turn of the 20th century.”

Through it all, Beatty endured. Gold mining continued at a small scale until the open-pit Bullfrog Mine opened in 1989, producing 2.3 million ounces of gold until Barrick Gold closed the mine in 1999 due to depleted reserves and the decline of gold prices. Beatty today is a small, family-oriented community.

AngloGold Ashanti is well aware of this sometimes fraught history, Fouche said.

“They’ve experienced the boom and bust from the Bullfrog mine that Barrick developed, and they’ve got some scars,” Fouche said. “We’re very cautious about how we move into Beatty as a true partner.”

Mining in one of the driest deserts

For decades, the Amargosa River has been the subject of much intrigue — and little scientific inquiry.

North of Beatty are the headwaters of the mostly underground river, which flows across the California state line into Badwater Basin at Death Valley National Park. Much of the hydrology in certain areas remains a mystery.

“As we develop these projects, we will have more science and a more robust understanding than anybody else does,” said Joel Donalson, AngloGold Ashanti’s vice president of sustainability.

In the nearby outpost of Amargosa Valley, local officials and residents said they fear the river’s ultimate decline at the hands of extractive development, whether it’s more mining, AI data centers or solar farms. Nye County residents’ fierce opposition to lithium exploration near Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge paid off last year as a Canadian company seemingly abandoned the project.

AngloGold Ashanti modified its preferred mining plan for North Bullfrog, calling it the “water conservation alternative” that would reduce total water demand by more than half and cut pit dewatering volumes by about two‑thirds, while reducing total material mined by roughly 50 percent compared with the original plan.

It could get its permits as soon as the end of this year from the Bureau of Land Management.

Fouche said the company has been intentional about water from the start, and it is largely the reason it has invested capital into buying out other companies’ interests in the area, not to develop them but to retire them and ensure the long-term sustainability of the river.

The company expects no impacts to the Amargosa toad, a species that has recently been considered for federal protections under the Endangered Species Act, Fouche added.

To Patrick Donnelly, Great Basin director of the Center for Biological Diversity environmental advocacy group, it’s clear that the North Bullfrog Mine is just a steppingstone toward the goal of developing the much larger Arthur deposit.

Once a mine is awarded permits through the federal environmental review process, it’s much easier to get more of them, Donnelly said. Developing that deposit, he said, will undoubtedly have much harsher impacts on the river.

“They’re saying the drawdown is going to take 300 years to come back,” Donnelly said in an interview. “We’re banking on Anglo being a viable company for the next 300 years, and maintaining the pipes, maintaining the spigots and paying the power bill for the pump.”

“If we’re talking about the maintenance of biodiversity and the sustenance of species and stopping extinction, that is antithetical,” he added.

Beatty’s coming transformation

Environmentalists like Donnelly believe the federal permits for the North Bullfrog mine are a done deal, though he said public input can make proposals better. When AngloGold Ashanti moves its focus to the Arthur deposit, Beatty is in for some sort of a metamorphosis, whether that’s an influx of residents, housing or more amenities.

For now, the North Bullfrog Mine has an expected operational life of 13 years once it is constructed if regulators adopt the water conservation alternative. But it’s clear that AngloGold Ashanti’s ambitions do not stop there.

According to Fouche, AngloGold Ashanti is invested in the development of Beatty, particularly in helping attract a supermarket to the area and making sure medical care is available at the town clinic every day of the week.

“We’ll see Beatty grow, but it’s going to be with North Bullfrog at a relatively slow pace,” Fouche said.

The company is aware of the stigma associated with what some call “man camps” full of single men who work at the mines, Fouche said, and executives are looking at ways to attract families to Nye County instead.

Nystrom, the mining historian, said it’s not unheard of that contemporary mining operations can breathe new life into old mining towns. Elko, a city in northeastern Nevada that has become synonymous with the state’s gold industry, didn’t become a major mining hub until the 1960s.

The bust that follows the boom of the Old West is much less likely in today’s era, Nystrom said.

“With modern mining, you’ve got long enough to build a whole suburb and live out a mortgage with a job in the mines,” Nystrom said. “That’s a different kind of story.”

Contact Alan Halaly at ahalaly@reviewjournal.com. Follow @AlanHalaly on X.