Highlights

• Tim Willoughby's essay romanticizes Western mining history but overlooks the critical reality: rare earths require complex downstream processing, not just extraction, and China controls the separation, refining, and magnet production that truly matter.
• Mountain Pass Mine produces 16% of global rare earth concentrate, but most material historically went to China for processing—mining isn't the bottleneck, chemistry and manufacturing at scale are.
• The piece succeeds as cultural history but fails as supply-chain analysis, reinforcing a dangerous narrative that mining more solves America's structural dependency on Chinese-dominated rare earth processing and magnet supply chains.

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When history becomes comfort food—and the supply chain slips away. Tim Willoughby’s essay (opens in a new tab) in Aspen Times is elegantly written, historically grounded, and deeply affectionate toward the mineral heritage of the American West. He recounts the arc of Western resource extraction: gold rushes, silver booms, copper’s rise with electrification, and the slow industrial layering of zinc, lead, molybdenum, tungsten, and uranium. These details are largely correct and thoughtfully narrated.

The American West and Mining go Hand in Hand

Some gaps are not in what the author reports, but rather in what is avoided. The article frames rare earth elements (REEs) as a continuation of a familiar Western mining story. That framing is comforting, literary, and incomplete.

The One Mine That Keeps Getting Mentioned

The Aspen Times piece correctly notes that the U.S. has a single major rare earth mine: Mountain Pass Mine. He also cites a widely repeated statistic—that roughly 16% of global rare earth production came from Mountain Pass in 2020. That figure is directionally accurate for mined concentrate, but it quietly masks the real dependency problem.

What is left unsaid: up until the Department of War made the capital injection, a good amount of the material was shipped to China for separation, refining, and magnet-grade processing. Mining is not the choke point. Chemistry at scale is. Magnets at scale are. And China dominates both.

When History Becomes a Hall of Mirrors

The essay’s long detour through Aspen, Leadville, borax, mercury, and silver photography is engaging—but it subtly implies that rare earths will follow the same pattern: discover, extract, adapt, prosper. That is speculation by analogy.

Rare earth elements and, for that matter, select critical minerals are not gold or silver. They are chemically complex, capital-intensive, environmentally constrained, and strategically controlled. The West’s historical agility in mining does not automatically translate into competitiveness in solvent extraction, separation trains, or sintered magnet manufacturing. An important point to ponder.

What’s Missing—and Why It Matters

Furthermore, there is no discussion of downstream processing, magnet supply chains, defense dependence, or industrial policy. No mention of China’s decades-long coordination between geology, chemistry, manufacturing, and vast amounts of allocated state capital. No acknowledgment that nostalgia is not a strategy. 

Of course, this omission isn’t malicious—but it is consequential. It risks reinforcing a media narrative that the U.S. simply needs to “mine more” to solve a far deeper structural challenge.

Why This Piece Still Matters

As cultural history, Willoughby’s article succeeds. As a supply-chain analysis, it stops short. And that gap is precisely why this piece is notable: it reflects how much of the Western conversation on rare earths remains anchored in the past while the real contest is happening downstream, offshore, and at an industrial scale.

Citation: Willoughby, T. “Minerals and the West.” News, Jan 25, 2026.