A Nevada Town Escapes the Slump, Thanks to Gold
Brad Horn for The New York Times
Wedding guests after the marriage of Bianca Hernandez and Jose Lomeli in Battle Mountain.
By STEVE FRIESS
BATTLE MOUNTAIN, Nev. — Hundreds of revelers crammed into this small town’s community center on a recent Saturday night to celebrate the marriage of Bianca Hernandez and Jose Lomeli.
Throngs danced to Spanish folk music well into the wee hours. Beer, wine and laughter were abundant, and several tables were piled high with gifts. “It’s not just the wedding,” said a friend of the newlyweds, Jesse Dias, 34. “Times are good around here. People are happy.”
Good times? Happy people? Hasn’t word of the national economic anxiety and resultant austerity made it to this remote high-desert capital of Lander County, 215 miles east of Reno?
Yes, it has, but the economic meltdown in much of the country has been a boon to the county and its 5,000 residents, 4,000 of whom live in the Battle Mountain area.
The reason: They mine gold in Lander County, a mineral-rich area that is a major reason Nevada, nicknamed the Silver State, is also the world’s fourth biggest producer of gold.
And when the broader economy declines and the value of the dollar fluctuates, people buy gold. At current prices — gold hit $892 an ounce on Monday, its highest price in three months and not that far off its record high of more than $1,000 an ounce in March — places like Battle Mountain hum with good-paying jobs and rising home values, making the financial woes of the rest of the country a distant concern.
“I don’t know of anybody who is getting foreclosed on; it’s just not something that’s an issue out here,” Charlotte Thompson, 56, said, shrugging as she seated diners on a frigid, wind-swept evening at the Owl Club Casino and Restaurant, the main attraction of Battle Mountain’s four-block main thoroughfare, Front Street. “That’s the way it usually goes, though. We’re always opposite of the rest of the country.”
To grasp how anomalous Battle Mountain is now, consider the data. Home foreclosures, as Ms. Thompson noted, are unheard of here, even though November was the 23rd consecutive month that Nevada had the nation’s highest foreclosure rate.
Unemployment in Lander County was 4.8 percent in November, while the statewide rate of 8 percent was the state’s highest since 1984. Two goldless counties bordering Lander, Nye and Pershing, had unemployment rates in November of 10.5 percent and 8 percent, respectively.
Even with annual salaries for average mining jobs starting at more than $60,000, the two largest mining companies in the area, Barrick and Newmont, cannot find enough qualified workers to fully staff their operations round-the-clock. Mr. Dias, the friend of the newlyweds, is working six days a week.
Robert Perry, a shift supervisor at Barrick’s Pipeline Mine, a 12-year-old facility near Battle Mountain that yields about a million ounces of gold a year and is expected to continue to produce until 2014, said the mine was always interviewing and hiring people.
“Our housing market, I would say, is better than most, just because there are jobs around here,” Mr. Perry said. “My house I bought five years ago for $134,000, and right now it’s worth about $300,000.”
The gold-mining business is doing so well that industry lobbyists did not complain when the Nevada Legislature passed a measure in early December requiring mining companies to pay $28 million in 2009 taxes early to help the state patch a $340-million shortfall in revenue.
And Barrick is set to spend nearly $500 million to open a new mine near Pipeline, provided it wins a legal challenge by the Western Shoshone Indians, who assert that the mine would disturb the tribe’s most sacred religious site.
“In tough times, people need a backup for their money, and that backup is gold,” said Omar Jabara, a spokesman for the Newmont Mining Corporation, which operates eight Nevada mines that yielded 2.3 million ounces of gold in 2007.
Battle Mountain residents are clearly enjoying the upswing, just as they clearly suffered through the high-tech boom of the late 1990s that brought prosperity to much of the rest of the nation. During that time, gold fell to about $215 an ounce, the local economy was moribund and several mines laid off workers. The Owl closed for four years, during which Ms. Thompson worked as a truck driver.
“We went 11 years without a new business really opening up here, but now we’re getting a new furniture store, and there are some new commercial businesses opening that are mining-related,” said Sarah Burkhart, director of the Battle Mountain Chamber of Commerce. “We’re getting a Family Dollar, and that’s kind of a biggie for us because it’s like a mini-Wal-Mart.” (The nearest Wal-Mart is about 50 miles away in Winnemucca.)
These signs of prosperity are especially gratifying to residents who took umbrage at a 7,000-word cover article in The Washington Post Magazine in December 2001 in which the writer, Gene Weingarten, went searching for the “armpit of America,” and found it in Battle Mountain. Some town boosters, like Ms. Burkhart, used the national notoriety to organize three annual Armpit Festivals, sponsored by the deodorant-maker Old Spice, but others were insulted by the article and glad when the festivals were abandoned.
Bucking the Trend “I think we ought to have a little more pride than that,” said Kimberlie Davis, owner of Sage Homes, a company here that builds about 25 homes a year in Lander and neighboring counties. “If that’s all we have to market, then don’t market it.”
There is so little to see in Battle Mountain that the state’s promotional map, Nevada Wide Open, designed to generate interest in tourism in the sparser, less-known regions of the state, does not highlight it. The town has no traffic lights. Besides two small casinos and one legal brothel that caters almost exclusively to truckers who crisscross the nation on Interstate 80, there is a pizza place, a coffee shop, a McDonald’s and a Super 8 motel.
“Oh, we’ll drive 75 miles to go get Chinese food,” said Ms. Davis, 39, who moved here from Portland, Ore., in 1989 after visiting a childhood friend who had come here to be with her miner boyfriend. “If you’re going to the movies, that’s 55 miles. It’s an event. You make a big deal out of it. You give up conveniences of the big urban areas for a great deal of safety and comfort and a really nice place to raise your families.”
The town’s isolation and its dominant, blue-collar industry propel many of its disaffected young people to pursue college degrees.
“It’s too small — there’s not enough opportunity as there is in a big city,” said Ed Figueroa, 20, home for a holiday visit from the University of Nevada at Reno, where he is studying international business administration. “There’s nothing to do here. All our parents work at mines. I like to come back and see friends, but the town itself is ... whatever, you know?”
Both Ms. Davis and Ms. Burkhart shrugged off such statements, citing numerous examples of Battle Mountain natives who do return, as Ms. Davis noted, “after they swear they never will.”
Most everyone here is concerned that a national economic recovery could drive gold prices down again. A Barrick spokesman, Louis A. Schack, agreed that it was a danger, but he noted that in the decade since the last major slump, gold had become a staple as an electrical conductor in things like cellphones and most high-tech wiring, boosting its value considerably.
Yet Mr. Schack acknowledged that commodity markets were unpredictable, so Ms. Davis and the rest of Battle Mountain know that slow times could return and are determined to enjoy their good fortune while it lasts.
“It’s a very unique economy that exists out here,” Ms. Davis said. “I don’t want the national economy to be awful by any stretch. I like a happy medium. There is a point when everything’s even, when it’s good here and good everywhere else, too, but it’s very short lived.
“More than likely, gold’s going to devalue and the cycle will start all over again.”
