Judge upholds permit for Contango's Johnson Tract road after company finished building it

A federal judge has upheld the permit for a mining exploration road and two bridges at the Johnson Tract in Lake Clark National Park and Preserve, but by the time she ruled, the company had already finished building them.

Fairbanks-based Contango Silver & Gold told investors Sept. 8 that crews had completed the road from its camp to the site where it plans to tunnel underground, including bridges over Double Glacier Creek and the Johnson River, according to a release filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Six days later, U.S. District Judge Sharon Gleason upheld the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers permit for that work and closed the case.

Cook Inletkeeper, the Chickaloon Village Traditional Council, the Center for Biological Diversity and commercial fisherman Anna-Maria Mueller had sued in May 2025, arguing the permit violated the Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Water Act. Gleason rejected all three claims, siding with the Corps and JT Mining, the Contango subsidiary that holds the permit.

Construction could go ahead while the case was pending because a permit stays in force unless a court halts the work, and the plaintiffs never asked it to. The court's docket shows no request for an order to stop construction while the case played out. Instead, the plaintiffs asked the court to rule that the permit broke the law and cancel it.

The Johnson Tract is a roughly 21,000-acre property owned by Cook Inlet Region Inc. inside Lake Clark National Park and Preserve, at the headwaters of the Johnson River above Cook Inlet. The Corps permit covers about 2.3 miles of road and an expansion of the site's airstrip to 5,000 feet, according to the court. Contango said in its release that the site preparation for its underground exploration tunnel is also complete.

The permit covers only exploration. The mine Contango hopes to build is under a separate federal review, which the Corps is leading with the National Park Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The company plans an underground mine producing copper, zinc, gold, silver and lead, with ore sealed in containers, trucked to the coast and shipped by barge from Cook Inlet. A federal permitting dashboard estimates that review will finish in May 2028.