This story is co-published with Public Domain.
In November 2024, the U.S. Forest Service sent a cease-and-desist letter to Galena Mines LLC after discovering an unauthorized cabin had been built that fall in a remote area of the Sawtooth National Forest in Idaho.
At the time, tech megamillionaire Michael Boren was listed as the sole manager of Galena Mines LLC, a Boise-based company that was formed in 2020 and owns historic mining claims in the Sawtooths. It’s unclear who was responsible for the cabin’s construction, but one of Galena’s mining claims was nearby. After determining that the cabin was constructed nearly a mile north of where the company’s claims are located, the Forest Service ordered Galena Mines and Boren to not only remove the cabin by July 1, 2025, but also to submit a restoration plan within 45 days and follow through with it no later than Aug. 1, 2025.
“Because there is no authorization for the surface disturbance and construction of the cabin that has occurred on [ Forest Service] land, the cabin must be removed and the area restored to its natural condition,” Kirk Flannigan, the area ranger for the Sawtooth National Recreation Area, wrote in the letter. He warned that “failure to comply with this notice may result in referral of this matter to the United States Attorney for the District of Idaho for appropriate legal action or removal and impoundment of the improvements at your expense.”
Nearly two years later, the cabin still stands inside the Sawtooth National Recreation Area, a protected swath of the larger Sawtooth National Forest. Now the undersecretary of agriculture for natural resources and environment at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Boren oversees the Forest Service and the approximately 193 million acres of public land it manages, including those in the Sawtooths.
Aaron Murphy, co-founder of the advocacy group American Hunters and Anglers, recently traveled to central Idaho and located the cabin — a seemingly unfinished log structure in a clearing along a Forest Service road in the Boulder Mountains. His organization posted footage of it to its social media accounts.
In an interview with Public Domain and High Country News, Murphy condemned the fact that the cabin has not been removed, despite clear orders from the Forest Service.
Records and internal communications that government watchdog group Campaign for Accountability obtained through a public records request and shared with Public Domain and High Country News show competing views about where Galena Mines’ relevant patented mining claims are located. In 2003, a previous owner of the claims hired a surveyor named Kim Leavitt to survey the patents, which include full ownership of both surface and mineral rights. Leavitt ultimately concluded that the claims were located along Germania Creek, approximately one mile north of where Bureau of Land Management maps showed them to be. The following year, however, Forest Service and BLM staff conducted their own survey and determined Leavitt’s findings were incorrect. READ MORE