Company Issues Eviction Notice : Remote Mining Town’s Time Finally Tapped Out

MOUNTAIN PASS, Calif. â€”  On those rare days when clouds roll over the cactus-covered hills and snakes are not about, Bridgett Sandoz and her mother, Wanda, often go for walks among the nearby clapboard and tin ruins left by frontier prospectors.

As they wander among the relics, they muse that by this time next year their own mining community of Mountain Pass also will be a ghost town.

No more company socials in the recreation hall marked by a tattered sign that reads “Eats and Beer.� No more birthday parties by the swimming pool. No more Jeep chases over the barren Mescal Mountains.

By order of the company that owns this town--tucked in a canyon about 60 miles southwest of Las Vegas--the Sandoz family and about 100 others will have to find another place to live by September, 1987.

Peace, Security Shattered

The eviction notice came in April and shattered the sense of peace and security that has existed in this nest of mobile home dwellers since it was created by Molycorp Inc., a subsidiary of Los Angeles-based Unocal Corp., about 25 years ago.

“It hurts to think that pretty soon our town will be just like those ruins,� said Bridgett Sandoz, 23, who moved here with her family 21 years ago, married a mine worker and is now expecting her first child.

“At first we wanted to fight, but this is Unocal we have to fight--a big company--and now many are resigned to it,� said Wanda Sandoz, 42, a member of the Mountain Pass Town Council and a Sunday school teacher. Her husband, Henry, is a maintenance man at the mine.

The eviction order will bring an end to one of the last company towns in Southern California.

“In many ways, Mountain Pass represents something very basic about frontier society,� said Tom Anderson, senior geologist for the California Department of Conservation’s division of mines and geology. “It is the last vestige of early Americana out there and it will be sad to see it go.�

No Choice But to Close Town

Company officials say they had no choice but to close the town and make the mine workers commute to their jobs. The mine will stay in full operation.

“The reason is basically economic,� said Robert Sega, manager of the open pit operation, which produces rare earth minerals such as neodymium, europium and lanthanum.

Sega said reduced demand on the world market, increased competition here and overseas, coupled with higher costs of providing services at the camp, have made it a $750,000-a-year financial burden that the company can no longer afford.

“Lead being taken out of gasoline had a lot to do with it,� Sega said. “The mineral that paid the rent here, lanthanum hydrate, was used to increase the yield of gasoline from heavy crude oils. . . . New refining processes use less lanthanum and half our market has evaporated.

“We are not the big bad monsters they think we are--we care about them,� Sega insisted. “The mine has been a money maker for us but the profit margin has gone down.�

In an effort to ease the shock, the company has agreed to relocate mobile homes anywhere within a 75-mile radius of Mountain Pass. Mobile homes that cannot be moved will be bought by the company at fair market value, Sega said.

Many residents say they will move to Las Vegas. Others will scatter among the tiny towns that dot the nearby desert landscape, including Cima and Nipton, Calif., and Searchlight, Nev.

Some commuting workers will be eligible for company-operated van pools at a cost of $3 per day. Those living in remote areas will receive a travel subsidy of $6 a day.

But that may not be enough to satisfy those mine workers who have grown dependent upon the company over the years for more than an hourly wage of $12 to $15.

To lure workers to the isolated community, the company has charged each family only $30 a month to live here. Most trailers have television sets connected to satellite dishes provided by the company.

Within a five-minute walk of the mine is a general store where mine workers buy necessities on credit, a post office, a fire station with ambulance, a small park with a playground for children and a community swimming pool. There are about 100 mobile homes in town.

Half a mile west is the three-room elementary and junior high school. High school students attend classes in Baker, 30 miles away.

Center of Community

Most important is the recreation hall, which houses a small diner, four bowling lanes, seven video games, a beer bar with a small jukebox and walls covered with friendly graffiti.

In this plain brown building, the residents have held company functions, church services, birthday parties and fund-raisers. In recent weeks, they have also thrown tearful going away parties for some of the dozen or so families that have pulled up stakes since April.

But life here has been anything but cozy and residents have paid a price for the amenities.

“Your soul belongs to the company 24 hours a day,� said Wayne M. Faire, 50, a shipping foreman at the mine. “They call you at 2 a.m.--you get your pants on and get to work.�

Faire added: “We have to buy two months’ worth of groceries at a time at Las Vegas, 60 miles away, and take coolers of ice along to bring back frozen foods. We drive 15 miles for gas.�

Start a New Life

“A big disadvantage has been our distance from everything,� agreed Sandy Walsh, 38, secretary at the Mountain Pass School. “I could have kicked myself last year for moving here when it took an hour and 15 minutes to get my 2-year-old boy to the hospital in Henderson (Nev.) by local ambulance.�

Now, Walsh and her husband, who works at the mine as a boiler-tender, plan to move and start a new life in Searchlight, Nev., where they have bought a share in a sporting goods store. But they will miss the overall security of the place. Walsh even compared the company to the town’s “mother.�

“When the plumbing goes out, for example, you call the company and say, ‘Hey, mom, there’s water all over the floor,’ � Walsh said. “It says, ‘Honey, don’t worry, there will be someone right out to fix it.’ �

Toll on Children

Walsh, for one, believes that kind of dependence has been a stifling but unavoidable consequence of living in such a company town. She worried that the life style has taken a toll on children.

“My 8-year-old boy said he wants to be a heavy equipment operator when he grows up,� Walsh said. “But I want him to know about college, that there is a world out there, that life doesn’t revolve around the mine.�

Lori Pease, a miner’s daughter who has lived here for all of her 21 years and married a driller/blaster employed at the mine, vehemently disagreed with Walsh.

“I can’t remember a day I wasn’t proud of my father, who left the house at 6 a.m. each day and came home every night covered with dirt and sweat and a big smile on his face,� said Pease, who works at the recreation hall diner and longs to raise her 2-year-old daughter here. “I’m staying until they kick me out.�

Swapped Memories

After living so long in relative isolation, she added, “I’ll probably go nuts in Las Vegas, which is where I’ll probably have to move.�

When Pease turned 21 last week, she celebrated the occasion in Mountain Pass with her girlfriends, instead of in Las Vegas or at Whiskey Pete’s, a gambling palace built to look like a neon-studded castle near the California-Nevada state line about 20 miles northeast of here.

At the party, Pease and her friends sipped champagne by the pool and swapped memories, perhaps for the last time, of experiences they could only have shared in a place like Mountain Pass.

They remembered snake hunting on summer nights.

“We’d all pile into a pickup and go after snakes on the mountain roads--blow their heads off or whatever,� Paula Gray, 22, said. “I met my husband going snake hunting. Romantic, eh?�

‘I’ll Cry About This Place’

And playing “Cat and Mouse.�

“A Jeep is the mouse and a truck is the cat,� said Kathy Post, 24, who works as a cashier at Whiskey Pete’s and attends modeling school. “The mouse gets a five-minute head start and then the cat chases it over the mountain.�

“I’ll cry about this place till the day I die,� Pease said, staring out at a full moon rising over the Mescal Mountains to the south.

The first miners here were after silver and gold in the late 1800s, company officials said. By the turn of the century, the surrounding hills were punctured with hundreds of lead, zinc, copper and gold and tungsten mines.

In April, 1949, Molycorp geologists discovered that the area contained one of the world’s richest deposits of rare earth minerals, and bought major claims.

Uses for Minerals

A few years later, the company’s Mountain Pass mine was in full swing, blasting cutting holes, crushing 2,000 tons of ore a day and then separating and purifying the minerals it contained.

Lanthanum is used to increase yield of gasoline from heavy crude oils. Neodymium is used to improve electrical properties of ceramic capacitors and to make powerful magnets. Europium, yttrium, cerium and terbium reduce energy consumption in fluorescent lamps.

As demand for these and other minerals increased, the company called for workers willing to live and work in one of the harshest terrains anywhere.

Between 1960 and 1986, the number of families living in the area swelled to more than 100, including a handful of Caltrans workers and three Highway Patrol officers who reside nearby and will not have to move.

Adopted Life Style

Bill Patterson, 36, came from a small mining town in Washington 18 years ago. Like most people here, he quickly adopted its life style of hard work, hunting, four-wheeling and fishing at the Colorado River 35 miles to the east.

Last week, Patterson sent his wife and children back to Washington in an effort to save money and pay off debts accumulated while enjoying “$30-a-month-rent life style.�

“I send my checks to my wife--she pays the bills and sends me back my grocery money,� said Patterson, who lives alone in a camper and gets around town in a dune buggy. “I’ll be here till they kick me off the hill. . . . Then I’ll head north.�

“I get angry when I have to tell friends goodby or walk out in the garden and think we have to leave it behind,� Wanda Sandoz said. “But I still water that garden because I keep hoping at the last minute the company will say we can stay.�