Tungsten Wakes Up in the American West: An Idaho Find and a Montana Pilot in One Day

The United States has not commercially mined tungsten since 2015, and it imports more than half of what it uses. Keep that in mind, because this past Friday delivered two tungsten headlines from the American West in a single day, as Mining.com reported: a surprise discovery in Idaho’s copper belt, and a defense-backed plan to start processing tungsten in Montana.

The Idaho surprise

IDEX Metals, a Vancouver junior drilling the Freeze copper project about 125 kilometers north of Boise, went back and re-tested drill core from its Kismet target with a more thorough lab method, and found tungsten the first round of assays had missed. The re-assays returned long mineralized runs, including 180.5 meters grading 0.11 percent tungsten trioxide, with a high-grade slice of 1.55 percent, alongside the copper and molybdenum the company was already chasing. CEO Clayton Fisher said the results add “an entirely new and important critical-metals dimension” to the property.

The honest caveats: this is two holes, there is no resource estimate, and it does not make Freeze a tungsten mine. But it lands in an Idaho copper belt that has been drawing serious attention since Barrick invested $23 million in Hercules Metals after the 2023 Leviathan discovery, and it puts one more critical mineral on Idaho’s scoreboard.

The Montana pilot

Hours later came the supply-chain half of the story. Guardian Metal Resources announced a partnership with the Montana Mining Association, Montana Technological University, and the Army Research Laboratory to pilot tungsten recovery on US soil. Roughly 250 to 400 tonnes of legacy ore from the historic Tempiute mine in Nevada, a past producer discovered in 1916, will be trucked to Philipsburg, Montana for trial processing, with first shipments expected by late summer 2026. The goal: prove a path to American-made tungsten metal powder for defense applications.

Why tungsten, why now

Tungsten is the hardest-working metal most people never think about: it edges the drill bits and cutting tools that shape nearly every manufactured part, and its density makes it the material of choice for armor-piercing penetrators, which is why the Pentagon treats it as a strategic priority. See tungsten in our Strategic Metals Glossary for the full picture.

And this story has deep Idaho roots. The Stibnite district our tour visits in Episode 4 supplied roughly half of America’s tungsten during World War II, and Perpetua Resources is evaluating tungsten potential there today. A discovery up the road, a processing pilot two states over, and a wartime legacy in between: the map of American tungsten is starting to fill back in.

The tour connection

This one touches three Season 1 states: Idaho’s copper belt (and Stibnite’s tungsten history, Episode 4), Montana, where Butte’s own Montana Tech joins the processing pilot (Episode 11), and Nevada, where the feedstock comes from (Episodes 5 and 6). Track who’s working where on The Drill Grid, and read the full Idaho and Montana master reports.