Utah

The Mysterious Devices Speeding Mining Exploration in Utah

Published

2 months ago

February 7, 2026

The Mysterious Devices Speeding Mining Exploration in Utah

Bushwhacking through a stand of stunted aspens above 10,000 feet in Utah’s Tushar mountain range, the mountain guide Trevor Katz held his Garmin to the sky and pointed it south. “We should just look for an opening,” he said, glancing over at his colleague, Bailey Pugh, from under a ball cap he’d cut into a visor.

He took a few steps steeply uphill, then down, careful not to slide on the scree. “It says it’s right below us, by probably 10 meters. Wait, five.”

Wading through walls of branches, he and Pugh circled, eyes trained on the ground. Then, there it was. Stuck in the dirt, the hexagonal silver node looked like a device an alien could have planted. Its small antenna and carrying strap sat above the earth. A sharp spike below anchored it into the slope. It would be a strange thing to stumble upon this so high in the mountains, surrounded only by what can survive at such an elevation.

This is just one of 200 nodes planted across the range in a tidy grid, each tracked with a GPS waypoint. Earlier, they had placed the nodes in the ground; now it was time to extract them. Pugh hoisted this one out of the ground and into her pack. Then it was back to bushwhacking.

“This is why they had to hire mountain guides,” Pugh told me, as we picked our steps carefully across boulders.

At the beginning of the summer, Katz and Pugh had received an email from the owner of a guiding company they’d worked for in the past: A client needed mountain-savvy day workers for a new project—any interest? The biggest hint they got about the purpose of the project was the field crew’s meeting place, the Deer Trail Mine, at the mountains’ eastern base. Each team was given a set of GPS waypoints and told to take a 20-pound node, about as big as a football, to each location, plant it in the ground, and mark its location. “It was really mysterious,” Levi Warr, another crew member, told me. But the pay was good—$500 a day, plus a per diem, as much as they’d usually earn for a few days of guiding—and the instructions were clear enough, so out they went.

Only as the summer went on did the crew come to understand, from chatting with the project geologists and fieldwork managers, what exactly they were doing: helping locate some of the nation’s most in-demand minable resources across a patchwork of public and private lands. Arranged in grids that connect to low-Earth-orbit satellites, the nodes are capable of collecting and sharing data used to create high-resolution maps of anomalies, miles underground, that might be gold, copper, nickel, lithium, or other minerals.

The nodes used in the project were first released three years ago by the Australian company Fleet Space Technologies, and although they’ve been adopted by mining giants internationally, how widely they’re being used in the United States is unclear. Compared with older and more invasive survey methods, this technology can be deployed with minimal impact. According to Fleet Space, it can be particularly useful for surveying areas where permits are required—for the Fishlake National Forest, for example, and the Bureau of Land Management territory enveloping the Tushar Mountains. If this quiet method of mineral exploration is successful, it will have threaded a loophole in the law governing public lands, helping open them for mining that much more quickly—and controversially. All it will take is a few hundred nodes, a clear view of the sky to connect to satellites, and a small team of people who know how to traverse rough terrain.

Lauren Steele

Utah locals, including Bailey Pugh and Trevor Katz, were hired to conduct fieldwork for the mining project.

Historically, mining-exploration projects have depended on a giant boom. Drop hammers, trucks with vibrating baseplates, and dynamite blasts send seismic waves through the Earth’s subsurface to a grid of geophones. The waves’ travel times are translated into rough maps of mineralized zones. On U.S. public lands, taking even this first step toward a new mine means getting approval, whether from the Forest Service or the BLM, a process that can be stringent and slow, requiring data collection and environmental assessment.

Instead of shakes and booms, Fleet Space’s node system relies on the naturally occurring vibrations of the earth and the sound waves created by those walking upon it. These scraps of seismic data from everyday life are gathered by the nodes’ internal geophones. After collection, the data are processed into “ambient-noise tomography,” or ANT, surveys, which provide the highest level of detail of what is underground, compared with traditional methods. (Fleet Space did not respond to a request for comment.)

The American West has long led the country in producing gold, copper, coal, and silver, as well as rare, sought-after elements, such as beryllium, that can be used for aerospace and defense technologies. The unique geologic profiles here—the Colorado Plateau, the Basin and Range region, the Rocky Mountains—are side effects of ancient inland seas, volcanic history, and an active boundary between two tectonic plates. Billions of years of pressure, folding, and depositing created a region rich with minerals just close enough to the surface to mine.

In the 1860s, white settlers flocked to what would become Marysvale, where the Deer Trail Mine is now located, with high hopes to strike gold, silver, and copper. By the 1930s, though, most of the mines had closed: The shallower, more accessible resources had been tapped, and it was too expensive to keep trying to get rich.

Over the years, a series of companies have bought the Deer Trail Mine in failed attempts to revive it, Helen and Alan Johnson told me. They’re lifelong residents of Marysvale and former employees of the mine, and they agreed to meet me at a Mexican restaurant in Orem, Utah, to talk history. Most recently, in 2018, MAG Silver, a Canadian company, bought the mine. The new owners had started exploring national-forest land for silver, gold, and copper with more traditional methods before turning to the Fleet Space nodes for this summer’s surveys.

These minerals, plus others that Fleet Space nodes can help discover, including cobalt, nickel, and lithium, are all on the country’s list of critical minerals. Demand for these materials is growing exponentially: Together and separately, they are used in iPhones, photovoltaic panels, combat drones, and many other technologies now key to Americans’ quality of life or national security. Some materials, like diamonds, can be whipped up in labs, but these particular resources come only from the ground.

Now the right combination of technology and political timing could mean that whatever is still in Utah’s mountains and elsewhere could be within reach for those who want it. As tariffs have kicked in and America seeks to ease its reliance on China for refined metals and minerals, the Trump administration has turned its attention to opening up U.S. land for mining—even when that means that the companies doing the mining aren’t American ones.

A close up of the mining node — Lauren Steele
Nodes are left in the field for days or weeks to collect data before they are removed from the ground.

To plant one of the ANT nodes, Trevor Katz told me while walking up a slope scattered with juniper trees, does not require much. Hike in with a pickax, dig a hole a few inches deep, and place the sharp end of the node into that hole, making sure the spike containing the geophone is completely covered. To extract it, just pull it out of the ground and hike it out.

He and Pugh did this over and over, often putting in a dozen miles a day, as the field crew placed and extracted 200 nodes four separate times, first for a regional survey that covered about 50 square miles across BLM territory, national forest, and land the mine already owns, then for three surveys, mostly on Forest Service land, that made a more detailed search for anomalies.

To regulate mining activities on public land, balancing its responsibility to both conserve the land and make it useful, the Forest Service is supposed to consider an activity’s “surface disturbance.” Exploration that’s unlikely to cause “significant” disturbance can go forward without the Forest Service’s involvement. This distinction has helped separate casual use of public lands—such as private citizens panning for gold, which anyone can do freely—from commercial activities.

The surveys conducted last summer for the Deer Trail Mine project didn’t have any permits associated with them. I filed a Freedom of Information Act request for documentation of the ANT surveys filed by or on behalf of any of the stakeholders involved in the project, including MAG Silver and the Deer Trail Mine; none were filed with the BLM or the U.S. Forest Service. The companies involved in the project either did not respond to requests for comment or declined to comment for this article. The Fishlake National Forest Ranger Station, which has long worked with Deer Trail Mine and is responsible for all permitting and communication regarding the company’s mining activities on Forest Service land, told me that any commercial exploration at all would be expected to be disclosed to the rangers but that the station had no knowledge of the ANT surveys.

A spokesperson for the Forest Service’s national press office told me, however, that this type of survey does not need a permit or even a formal notice of intent, which the agency uses to determine whether further oversight is needed. But the legal experts I asked about the ANT nodes told me that they fall into a gray area of the law.

The key term is “significant disturbance,” Elizabeth Craddock, a government-relations attorney and a partner at Holland & Knight in Washington, D.C., who specializes in natural resources, told me. But the regulation itself doesn’t define what significant means, she said, so what counts is up for interpretation. These commercial-exploration projects seem to have found a way to quietly bypass federal regulations that outline how and when approval is given before exploration begins on public lands.

A forest and hills — Lauren Steele
Utah’s Fishlake National Forest spans nearly 2 million acres and is home to the world’s largest living organism, an aspen stand called Pando.

If the Deer Trail Mine project goes back into operation, it will need permits. This past fall, it was acquired, as part of MAG Silver, by another Canadian company, Pan American Silver—which has not pursued any further work on the project so far. But any next steps toward reopening a mine here could go faster than ever too.

Last March, President Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to expedite mining projects and prioritize mining activities on public lands. The administration has also made changes, at least temporarily, to the National Environmental Policy Act review process to accelerate project approvals. Agencies are no longer required to analyze long-term environmental effects that are hard to trace back to the initial cause, which significantly reduces the scope of every project’s review.

Opening up new mining operations would be in keeping with the founding directive of the Forest Service, which mandates the balance of protecting resources and extracting them. Many mines give small, rural towns a needed economic boost too—in Marysvale, for instance, the median household income is $28,750 a year, and the unemployment rate is 63 percent.

Still, while he’s out retrieving the nodes that could make new mines a reality, Katz told me, he’s been “telling myself the little copes that everybody does”—that it’ll be a long time before this land is developed. Looking out over the windswept tops of Mount Holly and Delano Peak, into a valley meadow called Horse Heaven, and across the entire range, I imagined 800 empty holes where the nodes used to be. Katz had mentioned that the project’s marketing materials clearly said that all the holes would be filled in—perhaps a gesture toward a remediation plan for the survey’s relatively small impacts—but that he and other guides had not, in fact, filled them in. Those holes were nothing you’d see unless you were looking; it’s likely that the first hard autumn rain quietly washed them away. But if this particular combination of technology and policy does add up to more mining across the country, the result will be loud and obvious.

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Utah

Utah man’s trip to Mexico for dental implants cost him more than just money

Published

2 hours ago

April 16, 2026

Press Room

Utah man’s trip to Mexico for dental implants cost him more than just money

Paul had been living with dental problems for most of his adult life. Crowns that never fit quite right. Pain that made eating difficult. Then, one afternoon, one of his front teeth broke out completely.

“I was so ashamed,” Paul said. “I can’t go around like this. I need to do something.”

He researched options in Utah, looked at the costs, and concluded that traveling to Mexico for dental care was his best shot. He booked a flight to Cancun, signed paperwork he couldn’t fully read, and underwent a full-mouth restoration using a procedure called All-on-4.

What came next, he said, was one of the most stressful experiences of his life.

‘The minute they put it in, I knew something was wrong’

All-on-4 is one of the most widely marketed full-arch dental implant solutions in the world. The procedure anchors a full set of prosthetic teeth to four implants. For patients who have lost most or all of their teeth, it can be a meaningful improvement over traditional dentures.

But for Paul, and for many others just like him, the result was not what he had imagined.

Paul’s All-on-4 teeth

The prosthetic extended across his palate and pushed out past his lips. He developed a lisp. Eating became a new kind of ordeal — food collected in gaps he couldn’t reach.

“It was interfering with everything I wanted to do,” Paul said. “It felt like a trap on my mouth.”

He lost weight because eating was so difficult. He stopped sleeping well. And when he returned asked the clinic in Cancun to address his concerns, they were not helpful.

“They did half a procedure and then bailed,” he said. “They literally just disappeared.”

A common experience — and a growing alternative

Paul’s experience is more common than many patients realize. Dentists at Smile Clinic — a Midvale-based dental implant practice — say one of the most frequent calls they receive comes from people who have just had an All-on-4 procedure and are searching for alternatives.

Paul meeting with Dr. Logan Locke of Smile Clinic in Midvale. (Photo: Smile Clinic)

“They’ll have an All-on-4 done in the states or abroad, and they’ll be like, ‘This isn’t what I thought it was going to be,’” said Dr. Logan Locke at Smile Clinic who converted Paul’s case. “And so they immediately go to the internet and then they find us.”

Smile Clinic Utah offers a procedure called 3 on 6 — a full-arch restoration anchored by six implants with three separate zirconia bridges. The procedure was developed by Dr. Randy Roberts and is designed to address several of the functional and aesthetic limitations associated with traditional All-on-4 designs.

What makes the 2 procedures different

Both All-on-4 and 3 on 6 are permanent, implant-supported solutions for patients who have lost most or all of their teeth. But there are meaningful clinical differences in how each is constructed and maintained.

The All-on-4 uses four implants to support a single, full-arch prosthetic. Because it is one connected piece, it must be removed annually for deep cleaning — a process that requires replacing the screws each time and adds long-term maintenance costs. If any portion of the prosthetic chips or breaks, the entire piece typically must be replaced, which can cost several thousand dollars.

Photo: Smile Clinic

All-on-4 prosthetics are also often designed with a thick acrylic base that mimics gum tissue — which often requires the remove of the patient’s natural bone and gum tissue. The bulky prosthetic can affect eating and speech. Because the design does not preserve the natural gum line, cleaning the area between the prosthetic and actual gum tissue can be difficult.

The 3 on 6 approach uses six implants — two additional anchoring points — and divides the arch into three separate bridges. The segmented design allows for standard brushing and flossing, and a water pick can pass freely beneath each bridge. Because the bridges are individual pieces, a damaged tooth can be repaired or replaced in isolation rather than requiring replacement of the entire arch.

Perhaps most notably for patients like Paul, the 3 on 6 does not use artificial gum tissue. It is designed to work with a patient’s existing bone and tissue structure, producing a natural gum line and a thinner, more anatomically accurate tooth profile.

Dentists note that All-on-4 remains a viable option — particularly for patients who have suffered extreme bone loss. Unfortunately, few patients realize they have other treatment options available to them until after they’ve undergone irreversible bone and tissue removal.

Dr. Locke shows the thickness of Paul’s All-on-4 compared to the 3 on 6

Dr. Logan Locke shows the thickness of Paul’s All-on-4 compared to the 3 on 6. (Photo: Smile Clinic)

Paul’s conversion — and recovery

Paul arrived at Smile Clinic Utah about 10 days after his procedure in Cancun. His dentist there assessed the All-on-4 work and determined that, despite Paul’s functional discomfort, the underlying implants were reasonably well placed — and, critically, that Paul still had strong bone density.

“He’s young, he had teeth before they did the surgery, and he has a good amount of bone for us to use,” Dr. Locke explained during the procedure. “3 on 6 is a more conservative treatment option — we don’t have to remove all the bone and gum tissue. And I believe it’s a much sturdier and longer-lasting treatment option for people who already have that good bone and gum tissue.”

The team removed Paul’s All-on-4 prosthetic, placed additional implants, and installed 3 on 6 temporaries the same day. The clinical team noted the immediate difference in profile — the new prosthetic sat within the natural confines of the teeth rather than extending outward.

“Even just the day after surgery, it felt so much better,” Paul said.

Several months later, Paul returned to receive his final zirconia bridges. The material produces a look and feel closer to natural teeth than that of 3D-printed temporaries.

“I’ve never had teeth so nice before,” Paul said after the finals were placed.

Photo: Smile Clinic

‘They call me Smiley at work’

An avid trail runner who has completed events including the Moab Triple Crown — a series of ultramarathon races through the canyon country of southeastern Utah — Paul was eager to get back to the trails. He said the experience has changed more than just his teeth.

“Now it’s just in the background,” Paul said. “I don’t have to think about it. It’s not hanging over my head. I’m not self-conscious when I smile.”

He laughed when recounting how his coworkers have noticed. “They call me ‘smiley’ at work,” he said. “They’re like, ‘You’re always smiling.’”

Paul agreed to film his dental experience and you can watch his full story here.

About Smile Clinic Utah

Smile Clinic Utah is located at 718 W. Coliseum Way in Midvale, in the heart of the Salt Lake Valley. The practice offers full-mouth restoration services including 3 on 6, All-on-4, and individual dental implants. The clinic works with the only authorized facility in the world for manufacturing 3 on 6 smiles — which reduces costs and speeds up treatment timelines.

Free consultations are available in person and virtually. Financing options are also available for qualified patients. Schedule a free consultation by visiting Smile Clinic, or call (385) 406-3488.

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Utah

How a Utah County charter school helped hundreds with on-campus teen center

Published

14 hours ago

April 16, 2026

Press Room

How a Utah County charter school helped hundreds with on-campus teen center

SALT LAKE CITY — A teen center on a school campus in Utah County is keeping hundreds of community members fed, clean and warm every month.

Rockwell Charter High School, in the heart of Eagle Mountain, accommodates students from across the county. Executive Director Kat Mitchell said the area serves mostly “working-class families — both parents are working all day.”

The teen center began with a volunteer in the school’s cafeteria, Anke Weimann, who said it all started one day when she saw something that pained her.

“I was volunteering in the kitchen, and I saw a kid eating out of a trash can,” she said. “I think I was so taken aback because, just my preconceived notion of ‘America has got everything, and it’s got help for everybody.’”

She began to notice other signs — old duct-taped shoes, no coats on cold days, or falling asleep in class.

Weimann decided something needed to be done. She applied for and received a grant through the nonpartisan nonprofit The Policy Project, and the teen center was born, finished and furnished last year.

The teen center now allows students to visit to get water and snacks, find a quiet studying place, take a nap, get clothing, shower and do laundry.

Weimann said hundreds receive service every month. After school, community members with no ties to campus are also allowed in to use the facilities.

The interior of a teen center on the campus of Rockwell Charter High School is pictured on Wednesday. The charter school is now sharing its teen center with the entire community. (Photo: Shelby Lofton, KSL)

A central operation in the teen center is a coin system, where students earn coins by doing small tasks for teachers and staff. Weimann said the teen center was slow to start without it.

“A kid said, ‘Ma’am, if you start the coin thing, we would feel like we earned it,’” Weimann said. “And that started the food thing. And so many kids came and was excited to ‘OK, let’s go spend our coin because we worked hard,’ and then it started evolving and (became) ‘I’m going to take something home for my family to cook tonight.’”

Now students come and go from the center as they need, with the expectation that they go to class.

A student, Justin Davies, 18, said he stops by sometimes not just for the snacks, but for the community.

“I’ve grown a pretty good relationship with Anke over the years because I’ve come in here every day, even just not for snacks, just to say ‘hi’ to her because you enjoy talking to your teachers and your peers here,” he said.

Senior Georgie Wilkinson, 17, agreed.

“I know that some people don’t have the houses for people to come over for, like group projects or anything like that,” she said. “This is just a space for students to come in and work on that stuff, have food, have a place to just rest and some quiet from the chaos that is their life.”

Mitchell added that the school’s goal with the center is to teach students self-regulation skills.

“So, teaching the students, ‘When you feel like you need a break, advocate for that. We have a space for that,’” she said. “And of course there are some rules and boundaries around it.”

Ultimately, Davies said he sees the teen center as an important resource for those who have a hard time asking for help.

“Some people don’t want to talk about the struggles that they have to deal with,” he said. “Like, if they don’t have the same resources for food, money, I think this is a great option for them to come and maybe only talk to one person about it and be able to get a snack, and then not have to feel the same embarrassment.”

Wiemann said that was the reason for starting the center in the first place.

“There shouldn’t be barriers to education,” she said. “So anything that I could do to fill so that kids can just worry about studying — they don’t have to worry about, ‘I’m hungry,’ or ‘I need a shower,’ or ‘I need a coat.’ Come into the teen center, and I’ll find that.”

The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.

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Utah

Utah voters’ info will soon be available to anyone with $1,050

Published

1 day ago

April 15, 2026

Press Room

Utah voters’ info will soon be available to anyone with ,050

In the days since Utah’s top election official sent letters to more than 300,000 Utahns who previously opted to keep their voter registration records private, warning them their personal information is about to become public, questions and panic over the change have flooded social media platforms.

Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson mailed the notices earlier this month, informing voters that under the recently passed SB153, most voters’ data currently classified as “private” or “withheld” will be publicly accessible to anyone willing to pay a hefty fee beginning May 25.

Critics say the new state law puts vulnerable residents at risk, and that voters who sought privacy protections are right to be concerned.

The change coincides with sweeping efforts by President Donald Trump’s administration to obtain the entirety of state voter databases as he continues to make unsubstantiated claims of widespread election fraud. Henderson has resisted the move, embroiling her in a legal battle with the Justice Department.

Read Emily Anderson Stern and Sydney Jezik’s full story at sltrib.com.

This article is published through the Utah News Collaborative, a partnership of news organizations in Utah that aims to inform readers across the state.

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