The following is information from a FOIA request concerning the Sheep Creek Mine that Friends of the Bitterroot submitted on 10/20/2025. FOB finally received a response on 2/4/26.

One folder of the FOIA response includes the many comments submitted by concerned citizens. Thank you for commenting, it has made a difference. The Forest Service did not redact personal information from these documents, so we are not publishing them in the interest of privacy. We are urging the Forest Service to publish a redacted version in the Comment Reading Room for the project. If you are curious about what folks have to say about the mine, watch the Forest Service Sheep Creek project page at this address: https://www.fs.usda.gov/r01/bitterroot/projects/65203, go to get connected and then click on the comment reading room. Spoiler alert, only one comment was in favor of the mine. The first document below is all correspondence between USCM and the Forest Service which does have personal information redacted. The second document is the one inspection of the claim block and exploration activities completed in July of 2025.

In answer to our queries for maps of the claim block and any documents concerning the notice of intent they wrote, “US Critical Materials provided a map of their claims along with the 2022 Notice of Intent which publicly available on the Bitterroot National Forest website under the Sheep Creek Rare Earth Proposal project site. Additional information can also be found through public access at mylandmatters.org. Documents related to exploration are all publicly available on the Bitterroot National Forest website. The 2025 Notice of Intent for exploration in Sheep Creek is publicly available on the Bitterroot National Forest website.“