The owners of the proposed Johnson Tract metal mine in Lake Clark National Park said the project continues to gather momentum as they prepare to conduct more site work this year. But a group of businesses that call the pristine wilderness home is mobilizing against the mine, with the goal of keeping the coast wild.
Dorien Coray’s family has owned a bear photography and fishing operation on the west side of Cook Inlet since the mid-1980s. The business is at the mouth of the Johnson River, about 12 miles away from the river’s headwaters near the proposed Johnson Tract mine.
“There's not a lot of businesses there,” she said. “I'm not going to pretend that this is, you know, a massive subsistence village that's under threat, but it's all lots of multi-generational businesses for fishermen, lodges.”
A Facebook page created earlier this month, called “No Johnson Tract Mine,” describes itself as a grassroots group organizing against the mine. Organizers include lodges, a cabin company and wildlife photographers, which are also concerned about how industrial activity could threaten endangered beluga whales.
But Rick Van Nieuwenhuyse wants to set up a very different type of business in the area. He’s the CEO of the Fairbanks-based Contango Ore, which hopes to start mining on the west side of Cook Inlet by the end of the decade.
“It's five metals. It's gold, silver, zinc, copper and lead,” he said.
Van Nieuwenhuyse brought his mining pitch to Kenai business owners last month, where Coray sat in the audience. She said disruption from mining operations will touch areas bigger than the project footprint.
“I think there's worry about water quality for the Johnson River itself, obviously. I mean, we've got acid rain, acid mine drainage, but also just turbidity. I mean, there's going to be trucks, there's going to be industrial activity, you know. It's going to affect the water quality and also the wildlife,” Coray said.
Adam Rector works at the two lodges owned by Coray’s family – the Silver Salmon Creek Lodge and Alaska Homestead Lodge, and is especially concerned about wildlife impacts. He said an influx of commercial activity could habituate the west side’s coastal brown bears – that is, acclimate them to humans.
“The biggest danger to bears all over the country is food conditioning from humans,” Rector said. “What makes me nervous is a company that may not have that same prioritization of protecting the bears and keeping a clean camp. We just don't know what's going on 12 miles away.”
Contango Ore is an established Alaska mining operation. The company owns some or all of two mines already operating in Alaska – 30% of the Manh Cho gold mine near Tok and all of the Lucky Shot project near Willow. But the company’s Johnson Tract project is unique. The mine is in the middle of Lake Clark National Park, near the base of Mount Iliamna.
The actual mine sits on roughly a 20,000-acre carveout that’s owned by the Cook Inlet Regional Native Corporation, or CIRI.
The corporation acquired the land through an exchange with the federal government as a condition of the landmark Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act.
“They gave up rights to the park and preserve, but they kept the Johnson Tract project as a place that they can hopefully eventually make some money,” Van Nieuwenhuyse said.
CIRI has led some of the exploration at the Johnson Tract mine site, including with Contango Ore. The association said the project is an opportunity to “responsibly develop mineral resources” in a way that benefits shareholders, respects the environment and preserves the land.
Part of the project agreement Contango has with CIRI said the company must also perform an ethnography study – basically, how the project will interact with the area’s indigenous communities. Contango’s enlisted an Anchorage-based firm to conduct that study and lists the Kenaitze Indian Tribe and the Salmatof Tribal Council as among the groups it will work with in 2026.
Even though the project area is privately owned, getting materials in and out of the site requires moving through public land. That means various parts of the project need to go before groups like the National Park Service, the Alaska Department of Natural Resources, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and others.
Contango still has a ways to go before it starts taking any metals out of the ground, Van Nieuwenhuyse said. Work this year will continue to focus on environmental studies needed to advance permits. Those permits correspond to either mining operations or site access.
“We still have more exploration work to do so we're not making any mining decisions anytime soon. It'll be a couple of years – at least a couple of years from now. We are in the middle of the permitting process for a number of aspects of developing the mine,” he said.
Johnson Tract is also newly organized under an Obama-era program that aims to bolster the federal permitting process for large infrastructure projects. The project was admitted into the program in December, which Van Niewenhuyse said puts the project on a federal dashboard with the goal of improving organization and ensuring it advances efficiently.
Under Contango’s proposed schedule, mining would start in 2029. This year, Van Niewenhuyse said they plan to build a road up to the mouth of the mine.
Van Nieuwenhuyse said Contango is being mindful of the environment. He said they’re working to fill data gaps in prior studies of the area’s endangered beluga whales and they’re able to tap into the National Park Service’s extensive data on the area.
Plus, Contango’s signature mining model shifts a lot of the heavy industrial work away from the actual mine site.
Contango uses what it calls a direct shipping ore model to process mined material. Van Nieuwenhuyse said it’s how the company gets mining projects into production more quickly. Mined material is packaged and shipped offsite to an existing facility. That means no material mills, storage facility or power plant at the mine site.
Van Niewenhuyse said not every mine is a good candidate for Contago’s direct shipping ore model. But Johnson Tract is. That’s because of the high quality of the resource and the area’s proximity to water, which he lists among the cheapest forms of transportation.
Rector isn’t convinced but he said he wasn’t expecting for he and Van Nieuwenhuyse to change each other’s minds.
“We're not on the same side of this issue, so I didn't expect to agree,” Rector said. “I came to get information, and I think the next step for me is to public comment periods and get outreach to my friends and other people that work in the area, and that's what I have been trying to do.”
Businesses aren’t the only ones rallying against the mine.
A group of plaintiffs are challenging one of the mine’s permits in federal court.
The Kenai Peninsula-based environmental group Cook Inletkeeper, the Chickaloon Village Traditional Council, the Center for Biological Diversity and a fishery permit holder in Soldotna argue the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and two of its employees failed to adequately consider the impacts to endangered beluga whales when it awarded Contango Ore a permit.
Lawyers representing the Corps disagree, and say the plaintiffs fail to state a claim or relief and lack standing to bring their claims. The company’s lawyers also argue the case doesn’t fall under the court’s jurisdiction. Although not named as a defendant, lawyers for Contango Ore successfully got the company added to the case, due to its vested interest in the outcome.
As of early February, that case was still pending.
