KVIG Informative

Preferred Equities Corporation held approved plans in the early 1980s for a 25,000-lot subdivision across 12,653 acres of desert springs southwest of Las Vegas. The Nature Conservancy bought the land instead, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service turned it into Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge on June 18, 1984. Thirty-nine years later, a Canadian mining company proposed drilling into the same groundwater from just outside the refuge’s boundary. Federal regulators killed that project within days, not decades — a sign that the fight over who gets Ash Meadows’ water never fully ended.

Ash Meadows sits in a remote stretch of Nye County, fed by a desert aquifer system that reaches more than 100 miles to the northeast, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Nearly all of its water entered the ground tens of thousands of years ago, the agency says, which makes the supply effectively fixed rather than renewable. That water surfaces in a cluster of springs and pools that support at least 26 plants and animals found nowhere else on Earth, including the Devils Hole pupfish and several other endangered fish, according to the agency.

Development pressure on that water built through the 1960s and 1970s. Peat mining destroyed roughly 2,000 acres of wetlands in Carson Slough in the early 1960s, and corporate-scale farming operations later dammed and diverted water nearby, lowering the water table enough that at least one spring went dry, according to a history of the site published by the Nevada State Historic Preservation Office. The Ash Meadows poolfish, a species found only in those waters, went extinct as a result of that habitat loss, the same history states.

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By the early 1980s, Preferred Equities Corporation, a Las Vegas-based development company, held approved plans for a 25,000-lot subdivision spread across 12,653 acres of the valley, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service. The Nature Conservancy intervened, buying the land from the company and facilitating its transfer to the federal government. That sale cleared the way for the Fish and Wildlife Service to establish Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge on June 18, 1984. The refuge now totals roughly 23,000 acres, according to the agency.

Congress and international treaty bodies added further protection after that. Seven Ash Meadows plant species were listed as endangered or threatened in May 1985, and in April 1987 the refuge was designated a Wetland of International Importance under the Ramsar Convention, according to the Nevada State Historic Preservation Office’s history of the site.

That protection built on an earlier fight over the same water. Devils Hole, a detached 40-acre unit of Death Valley National Park administered by the National Park Service, sits inside the Ash Meadows valley the refuge now protects. In 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Cappaert v. United States that groundwater pumping on nearby private land could not be allowed to drain Devils Hole below a protected level, limiting withdrawals from existing wells and barring new ones nearby. That ruling had already reshaped who could draw from the aquifer years before Preferred Equities’ subdivision plans ever reached the refuge’s land.

The same vulnerability resurfaced in 2023. The Canadian mining company Rover Metals proposed drilling 30 exploratory boreholes for lithium on public land about 2,000 feet from the refuge boundary, directly in the path of groundwater that feeds Ash Meadows’ springs, according to the Center for Biological Diversity’s account of the dispute, which cites the Bureau of Land Management’s own project records. The Bureau of Land Management had initially authorized the drilling.

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The town of Beatty and the nonprofit Amargosa Conservancy asked the Bureau of Land Management to require a full environmental review before drilling began. The Center for Biological Diversity and the Amargosa Conservancy sued on July 7, 2023, and moved for a court order to halt the work ten days later. On July 19, 2023, the Bureau of Land Management withdrew its own authorization in two separate letters, concluding that the drilling was likely to disturb the groundwater feeding the refuge’s springs, according to the agency’s letters as described in the Center for Biological Diversity’s public records of the case.

The Bureau of Land Management has since proposed withdrawing the land around Ash Meadows from new mining claims for at least two years, a step meant to make the 2023 reversal permanent. That withdrawal has not been finalized, and federal mining law dating to 1872 still allows exploration on claims staked before any withdrawal takes effect. Ash Meadows survived a subdivision in 1984 because someone bought the land before the bulldozers arrived. Whether it survives the next threat to its water will depend on whether Washington finishes what it started in 2023 — or lets the clock run out again.