For nine years, Bryan Wells and his wife drew their drinking water from the clear flow of Emigrant Creek. A silver thread tumbling out of the Absaroka Mountains and through Wells's property in Montana’s Paradise Valley, Emigrant Creek joins the Yellowstone River, one of America’s most celebrated rivers. Together, these two waterways, one iconic, the other unknown, helped transform Wells, a conservative Trump voter, into a most unlikely environmental activist.

Wells, 63, has a long, graying beard, callused hands, and a deep, slow, gravely voice that sounds like stone, like the way a mountain would speak. After working for the Burlington Northern Railroad as a teenager, he saved enough money to buy an old miner’s cabin and a patch of land near Emigrant Creek when he was 18. In the 1980s, the railroad shut down its service in Livingston, Montana, the nearest town of consequence, putting many locals out of work. The region rebounded with an economy built around the Yellowstone River’s world-famous fly fishing and ever-growing tourist traffic to Yellowstone National Park, 17 miles south of Wells’s land. 

Wells now owns 84 acres and five cabins that he rents to visitors from around the world. Like many rural Americans, he loves the land he lives on. And like many (though not all) rural Americans, he’s a Republican, a pro-logging and pro-mining kind of guy. So when Lucky Minerals, a Canadian mining company, announced plans for an industrial-scale gold mine at the headwaters of Emigrant Creek in the mountains above his home, Wells wasn’t sure how to feel. 

“I’ve always made fun of NIMBYs,” he admits. 

I’m with Wells as he steers his Toyota Tacoma with 10-ply tires up a narrow, rocky track into the mountains. Putting boot to brake, he says he wants to show me something. We climb over a gate, and the trees open to reveal a clearing carpeted in knee-high grass. Wells looks around silently for moment and then tells me a story.

Five years ago, he was at a low point in his life. He had Lyme disease and his wife had cancer. A Montana mining company approached him with an offer to lease this plot of land and dig for gold. Needing money, Wells agreed. Later, he walked in on the CEO and another company executive ridiculing the Montana Department of Environmental Quality’s low requirements for reclamation bonds, which are required to cover cleanup costs. (For decades the region’s environmentalists have complained that these bonds are too little to cover the costs of reclamation.)

“That made me mad,” Wells says. “So I demanded $30,000 more.” 

Wells has nothing against mining, he insists. His wife’s ancestors were coal miners in Virginia who came to Montana in the 1860s during the region’s first gold rush. Her parents survived the Great Depression by mining six days a week in Emigrant Creek and trading gold they’d sifted for groceries. His wife still pans there. Then he holds up his hand to show me his wedding ring—22-karat, he says, made with gold mined from his own land.

The mining outfit initially refused to pay the additional thirty grand, but Wells wouldn’t budge on his request for more reclamation money, and eventually the company assented. Which is good, because within a year they’d left and Wells used the money he had secured from them to clean up the property. He’s proud of the site now, anomalously flat but green, and plans to build a cabin here. It would be beautiful, with high peaks rising above the trees. 

Up the road a ways, we walk along the creek, where water shoots from stone like toppled fire hydrants. Wells says a hydrologist told him that one of these springs pumps out 600 gallons of water a minute. The road continues up the mountains, deteriorating into a narrow ledge of jagged rocks. Wells is unfazed and keeps driving. He has more to show me. 

We pass an old mine site where a weathered wooden cabin still stands. For over a century, people have sought treasures in these wild peaks, and old mining tracks still climb to forgotten places. Wells points to an abandoned mine shaft on the mountain above us that is leaching acid drainage in a vomitus orange stripe. A few minutes later, we step out of the truck at another clearing, an acre or so in size, denuded of vegetation and scattered with sawed-off branches and a few forlorn bunches of grass. This was the area’s most recent exploratory mining site.

“This is reclaimed to the standards of your federal government,” he says mockingly.

This entire area, the deep forest, the pure brook, the mountainsides erupting in cliff faces and alpine summits—explored for generations, but never mined on a large scale—would be the site of Lucky Minerals’ 2,500-acre, industrial-scale mine. This is where the mountains would be hollowed out and hillsides would roar with mining machinery. There is gold and other valuable minerals in these mountains, we know that. We also know there are grizzlies and wolverines and other imperiled species of high and wild country. We know these mountains are a bear’s saunter from the refugium of Yellowstone National Park and a valuable piece of one of the most intact wild ecosystems left in the Lower 48.

For Bryan Wells and others, the health of the Yellowstone River is more valuable than gold.

The mountains, the crystal water that drains them, and the storied Yellowstone River at their feet have also become the central economic engine for the Paradise Valley and its surrounding communities. Vacationing fishers pump $70 million a year into the local economy. “Even the recession in '08 didn’t affect us,” Wells says. “Our economy now is recession-proof.”

By contrast, gold mining is typically boom or bust, employs few locals, and always pollutes surrounding waterways. People don’t travel across the country to pay fishing guides and rent cabins next to industrial mine sites. Wells and the Paradise Valley’s other entrepreneurs know this.

“I thought long and hard before coming out against this mine,” Wells admits. “After what I tried, who am I to say? But that wasn’t comparable in scale at all. And it was a mistake.”

So Wells did something he’d never done before. He joined with a host of other concerned locals in the Yellowstone Gateway Business Coalition and launched a spirited campaign to stop the mine and protect the Paradise Valley. Wells quickly became one of the coalition’s most visible spokespeople, to the chagrin of some friends. 

“They’re not happy with me for opposing it,” Wells says of friends who leased their properties to Lucky for exploratory drilling. The small parcels of private land and old mining claims in these mountains can accommodate mining exploration, but full-scale mines would require access to the vast national forest land that surrounds. So Wells and the YGBC have been pressuring their congressional representatives to ban all mining in these mountains (another gold mine is proposed in the mountains to the south, literally on the border of Yellowstone National Park). 

“They say they’ll have state-of-the-art reclamation,” Wells says in his slow, drawling voice of granite. “But this is what that looks like. There’s barely a blade of grass growing here.”

“For 44 years here, I’ve seen these guys come and go,” he says, pointing out that the same company accidentally spilled acid water into the creek when its holding pond collapsed. “The mine promoters are just salesmen.” 

He may have bumper stickers for Republican politicians on his truck and he may have opposed the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone, but Bryan Wells loves these mountains. It’s why he took his afternoon and abused his truck to bring me here. It’s why he stopped to show me a waterfall, only visible for a moment from the road. It’s why he told me the story of his daughter, who was raised at the foot of these mountains, once seeing a wolverine up here. Wells is as much a part of this place as the rock, the trees, the creek, or wildlife. 

He may have upset some friends in the mining fight, but he’s made many more. “What has impressed me about the business coalition is that it’s everyone—Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians,” he says while steering his truck back downhill. “I feel like I’ve learned a lot. Some of my environmentalist friends are people I would never talk to before and we disagree on a lot of things, but we can be friends. We can talk about stuff and share ideas and respect each other. That’s the way it should be.” 

Besides the warm fuzzies, the strategy also appears to be effective. On August 28, a spokesman for Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, a former Montana U.S. representative, announced Zinke’s support for a 20-year ban on all mining in the area. Now the YGBC is working to make that proposed ban permanent, which can only happen by an act of Congress. 

“We’re not done,” Wells told me after the surprise Zinke announcement. “We’re going to ask our delegation for legislation that can be passed for a permanent withdrawal [of mining claims].”

Working together—Republicans and Democrats, fishers and erstwhile miners—they may just do it. Thankfully, they have Wells on their side to speak for the mountains. He's genuine and completely without affectation, and the last couple years of activism have seen him forge a personal connection with Steven Daines, Montana’s Republican senator, and Zinke, rumored to be considering a Senate run of his own in the future. While passing through the area recently, Zinke called Wells to say hello. 

“Some people just can’t set aside their partisanship,” Wells explains about his newfound sense of community. “But I’ve got a great group of friends that have been able to set aside our ideologies and work for a common goal. I wish that could happen more, because there seems like there’s so much hatred anymore between people with different views. It doesn’t have to be that way.” 

The wolverines and waterways of Emigrant Peak and the Paradise Valley agree.