PORT ANGELES – About 20 people gathered Friday and Saturday morning on Olympic Hot Springs Road to protest exploratory mining under way on about 40 acres of private land on the northwest slopes of McDonald Mountain.

Clallam County sheriff’s deputies told the small band of peaceful protesters to leave the road before the mining company set off explosions at about noon on Saturday.

The road, which is west of Port Angeles, was closed during the blasts.

Forks-based Puget Sound Surfacers, which owns the land, blasted away part of the hillside, said Sheriff’s Sgt. Lyman Moores, who helped the county’s road department close the road.

The company hopes to create a rock quarry on the property.

Saturday was the last day until Sept. 1 that Puget Sound Surfacers could blast, under federal law.

The law protects the marbled murrelet – a species of small seabird that has been determined to be threatened by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Serive – that nests near the proposed quarry.

The marbled murrelet nests in forests along the Pacific Coast from California to Alaska.

While neighboring landowners will have a five-month respite from blasting, they plan to keep fighting the three-acre mine.

“We’re going to keep at it,” said Josephine Pedersen, who lives next to the land owned by Puget Sound Surfacers.

“It’s an affront to the (Elwha) river.”

But it is legal.

Under the state Forest Practices Act, landowners may mine up to three acres without a permit.

The site is about a mile north of the Elwha River entrance to Olympic National Park, and served by a small dirt road off Olympic Hot Spring Road.

Friday at 7 a.m., Pedersen and 17 others gathered with small protest signs, waiting for Mike Shaw, one of the owners of Puget Sound Surfacers to arrive.

One sign Pedersen made the night before read, “legal but wrong.”

The protesters were met by ranking members of the Clallam County Sheriff’s Department, including the department’s second in charge, Undersheriff Ron Peregrin, and Capt. Ron Cameron.

The law enforcement officers told the protesters to stay out of the path of traffic, but that otherwise they were within their rights.

The mood was jovial, with Cameron and the protesters joking about the early hour and the absence of any traffic on the road other than the Sheriff’s Department vehicles.

When Shaw arrived at 7:34 a.m., protesters waved their signs.

Shaw slowed, but did not stop as he turned onto the dirt road up to his site.

On Saturday, Shaw arrived with the employees that would do the blasting.

Moores said Saturday’s protest was also peaceful, and the protesters were polite to Shaw and his employees.

The protest ended when the road needed to be closed for the blasting, Moores said.