RENO, Nev. (AP) – Tribal leaders and environmentalists on Thursday were trying to persuade a federal judge to leave in place a nearly 2-year-old court order blocking a big gold mine expansion on a mountain that some tribes consider sacred.

Lawyers for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management want Judge Larry Hicks to lift the injunction that the Western Shoshone and others first won in December 2009. The order involved part of the Toronto-based Barrick Gold Corp.'s Cortez Hills project, located on Mount Tenabo, about 250 miles east of Reno.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled at the time the BLM had failed to adequately analyze the potential for the project to pollute the air and dry up scarce water resources in northeast Nevada's high desert.

About a dozen tribe members and supporters – some with signs that read “Water is more precious than gold” – gathered in front of the federal courthouse before the hearing for a “water honoring ceremony” and prayer.

“We have great concerns when large corporations and the federal government can trample our natural resources,” said Bryan Cassadore, chairman of the Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone.

“The spring water and natural resources of rural Nevada has always been important to the Western Shoshone Indians for thousands of years and continues to be,” he said.

Justice Department lawyers argued in their support of the BLM that the agency has a new analysis that it thinks complies with all state and federal environmental laws.

“BLM very thoroughly analyzed the project's potential effects on Native American beliefs and cultural practices,” wrote Ty Bair, a lawyer in the department's Environment and Natural Resources Division.

But lawyers for the tribes and the Reno-based Great Basin Resource Watch said the mining plans offer no specific protections for the environment, only a detailed schedule of monitoring intended to detect any potential pollution on groundwater supplies.

Roger Flynn, who represents the South Fork Band Council of Western Shoshone of Nevada, Timbisha Shoshone Tribe, Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone Indians of Nevada and the Western Shoshone Defense Project, said the BLM's plan to “monitor the drawdown and elimination of surface waters and springs/seeps, and then figure out a way to avoid these losses is the type of `impact first, develop a plan later' approach rejected by the Ninth Circuit.”

The appellate judges concluded BLM's review was inadequate under the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires a thorough examination of large-scale projects on federal land. They said the agency didn't fully consider the impact of air quality resulting from transporting ore to an off-site processing facility 70 miles away.

The judges also said the review didn't do enough to examine the likelihood that pumping water out of the pit would cause the groundwater level to drop and potentially dry up more than a dozen streams and springs.