Tellurium in the Klamath Mountains?

WHEN INTERSTATE 5 was built in the 1960s, it sliced through southwest Oregon’s Klamath Mountains, exposing their metamorphic innards. To Michael Cope, the brawny founder of American Mineral Research, this layer cake of mineralized rock proves that Josephine County is sitting on cache of valuable rare metals — and his small company hopes to eventually free up the resource so that it can be used in solar panels.

In early May, I met Cope on the shoulder of an I-5 off-ramp. The rain was sporadic, and we hurried across the road so that he could show me where he’d found gold a few years