A century-old limestone mine near Wrightwood seeks county sign-off to restart operations
The project is the Lone Pine Canyon Road Quarry, on roughly 285 acres of mining and reclamation across a 420-acre, three-parcel site along Lone Pine Canyon Road. Mining and processing have occurred there intermittently since 1924, and the county confirmed vested mining rights for the property in 2019. Ownership passed to Grand Lone Pine Canyon Enterprises, a West Covina entity, in August 2023; California Carbonates is the designated operator.
What sits in front of the county is narrower than a green light to mine. Because the mining rights are already vested, the only approvals required are the reclamation plan, the financial assurances, and the environmental finding that goes with them under the state's surface-mining law. The county's review, in other words, governs how the site gets restored as extraction proceeds — not whether extraction may happen.
The scale is long-dated. Project documents put total output at roughly 148 million cubic yards over the life of the quarry, averaging about 1 million cubic yards a year, with excavation reaching as much as 1,600 feet below existing grade and a quarry life projected to run more than a century. Operations would use conventional hard-rock methods — drilling, blasting, crushing, screening, and hauling — on land zoned for resource conservation.
The county has prepared a mitigated negative declaration, the finding that a project's effects can be reduced below significance without a full environmental impact report. Tribal consultation with the Yuhaaviatam of San Manuel Nation and the Twenty-Nine Palms Band of Mission Indians has been completed, with cultural-resource protections folded into the conditions. No hearing date for a final decision was set in the documents reviewed.
For operators, the read is supply, not spectacle. Ultra-high-purity calcium carbonate is an industrial input — it feeds manufacturing rather than construction — so a restarted high-grade source inside county lines is a regional materials development, distinct from the warehouse-and-aggregate story that usually defines IE land use.