The World's Largest Gold Mine | Super Structures | Spark

on a stone age island at the ends of the earth there is an astonishing

super

structure whose existence defies the imagination to build it men climbed mountains that no one could climb gave their lives building roads that no one could build drive the biggest trucks and shovels in the

world

world

where they could not climb thousands of feet skyward into a deadly realm of blinding mists and dangerous quests for astonishing riches. They did it all to extract a hidden fortune. A mountain made of

gold

in our satellite era. Cell phones and cyberspace. There are still some hidden places. one of them is irian jaya, a land born of fire crowned by ice where trackless jungles smother in the equatorial heat where icy mists envelop towering mountains and men still live untouched by time about 75 miles from the jungle shores a wall of mountains rises to sixteen thousand feet the highest peaks between the andes and the himalayas above them shines a natural wonder magnificent glaciers spawned by the ice age some fifteen thousand years ago just five degrees south of the equator just below These glaciers are a wonder of man.

Two gigantic

mine

s called Grossberg and Erzberg are less than two miles away and almost fourteen thousand feet high before they are exhausted. This mega

mine

can produce more

gold

than the entire California Gold Rush. Many They call it the most spectacular mineral deposit ever found, it's a mountain of mineral but it's not just that it's also a root of mineral, so if you had a tooth, you know, and you can see the part that sticks on top of the gum, that It's what most people extract, but if you extract that tooth and it has that long root, we have that.

Plus, and it's also full of ore, so you're looking at a vertical mile of gold deposit. It's just amazing. Grossberg and Erzberg are located about 700 miles north of Australia and 2,000 miles east of Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, in the western half of New Guinea, the world's second

largest

island, which was once a Dutch colony. , Irian Jaya is now a province of Indonesia and is home to some of the richest copper and gold deposits in the world, but Irian Jaya will not give up its treasures without a fight, the Grossberg Erzberg mining complex took 20 years to build and cost more than 3 thousand millions of dollars and claimed human lives at its vertiginous altitudes.

Men must work 24 hours a day, seven days a week to make mining profitable in one of the most remote places on the planet. The hard part about this was that Mother Nature implanted this single story body at 13,000 feet and she said come get it and we had to go get it when you go up there to try to explain it to someone. The best way is to leave with your mouth open, you're going to be a gog, people are going to say how the hell did you do that? This incredible story begins with a man, a Dutch geologist named Jean-Jacques Dosie, in 1993, at age 84, he returned to visit the mine of his courage became possible in 1936, Dosie, aged 27, swore to be the first man in reaching the tropical glaciers of irian jaya.

It seemed like a reckless boast. Europeans had been launching expeditions into the interior of Iran for 300 years. none had traversed the deadly labyrinth of the jungle between the mountains. and the sea the only way to get inland is by river the problem with rivers is that you don't know where the rivers lead this was a problem with the first expeditions that arrived in this area that tried to reach the glaciers they took the wrong river they passed A year and a half trying to reach the glacier alone because they took the wrong river seemed unlikely that Dozie would succeed where so many others had failed but Dozy possessed a recent 20th century invention that lifted him above the jungle and showed him the way forward he had the advantage of knowing what the terrain was like from the air once you knew the terrain once you knew which river to take once you knew the lay of the land pretty well you could move much faster October 29, 1936, two friends and eight porters began to go up the iqua river, they rowed to where the mountains began and began to walk, we walked as far as we could, we began to cut, we followed the path, we made a path and the higher we got the more difficult it became after a For a while they didn't know where they were because they had aerial photographs up to a certain point, but then the jungle gets quite steep and you're not really sure how far you have to go, exhausted like him.

Geologist dosie took the time to sketch a peculiar rock formation. You had a blackish black rock wall, a black mountain with big green and blue specks. As a geologist, of course I recognized that there must be some resistance to copper in that rock, but at the time I had to continue dozie had no way of knowing how right he was, in fact he had stumbled upon one of the greatest geological discoveries. of all time millions of years ago a series of volcanic eruptions injected riches into the mountains of irian jaya the erupting volcanoes opened deep cracks within the earth driven by hot gases molten magma from the earth's core flowed into these fissures carrying With unusually high concentrations of copper and gold, one of them was the strange black mountain of Jean-Jacques Dosi, the

largest

deposit of copper ever discovered on the surface of the earth.

Dosy collected some mineral samples from the curious copper mountain on his maps. field. He named it Herzberg, which is Dutch for ore mountain. Back in Holland, he wrote a report describing his discovery, but his timing couldn't have been worse. Posted sleepily. his report in the summer of 1939 on september 3 the second world war began while holland suffered under nazi occupation the erzberg report fell to dust 20 years later a dutch geologist gave it to forbes wilson wilson was chief engineer of freeport mines a american mining company forbes was a man who had to be the best or the biggest or the fastest or the smartest with anything and in fact he was in many areas, that is part of the reason why I think we are mining today in the seismic complex.

Wilson was searching for nickel deposits, but when he read Dozy's description of the Erzberg he completely forgot about nickel. After Forbes Wilson read the Dolce report and it became a part of his being, we can almost say he became a saint. grail for him, he was a 50 year old man at the time and a chain smoker he quit smoking he got fit and organized this expedition he had to find and see for himself herzberg on may 30 1960 forbes wilson immersed himself in the Jungle determined to reach the Erzberg asked his friend and fellow geologist Flint to accompany him Come on, Flint took the opportunity to participate in the adventure of a lifetime despite the dangers of walking through Irian Jaya.

The worst thing was the leeches and if you looked at a bush the leech should be there trying to find something warm that He could stick to, we would always get some and one time I found one on the roof of my mouth but if I hadn't been busy talking I guess It wouldn't have happened to me, but the leeches weren't the only ones hostile. Locals Just a year after Forbes Wilson's expedition, explorer Michael Rockefeller disappeared in Irian Jaya. Some believe that Governor Nelson Rockefeller's son drowned or was killed by sharks, but others are convinced that he was eaten by cannibals when Dill Flint and Forbes Wilson first encountered indigenous Aryans.

They felt threatened but for a different reason, even though you've seen pictures of them with their pumpkins covering their private parts the first time you see it it's a real shock, you feel very unequipped, I would say they came with all their finery and charged as if they were going on a war raid, which gave you the idea, but they turned it into a dance and everyone was happy on June 16, 1960, after 18 days of arduous travel, Dell Flint and Forbes Wilson found the Erzberg. A service inspection convinced them that it was actually a mineralogical marvel densely interwoven with huge chunks of a yellow copper mineral known as chalcopyrite, there were spots up to four feet wide or perhaps even longer that were solid calcaparic and when they saw that was just you stunned when I first got there and stood up on the thing, I just screamed like tires and this god yoho, I'm mine, all mine, the two American geologists had proven that Erzberg was really a mountain of ore, but jean-jacques dosie had called it an ore mountain on the moon who could build a mine in one of the most inaccessible places on earth in the 1960s irian jaya's copper and gold mountain looked as spectacular as forbes wilson He believed that rock samples from Erzberg had one of the highest copper contents ever found, however, no matter how rich, Herdsburg was virtually impossible to reach, but on April 5, 1967, with permission from the government of Indonesia, Freeport decided to try to build its mine.

Freeport hired Bechtel, a California engineering firm with a reputation for building things in places no one else could, but even Bechtel's engineers were stunned by irian jaya, to even reach Hertzberg the engineers would have to build a 75-mile highway. miles through some of the most difficult terrain in the world, first through the labyrinth of mangroves that hug the coast then through the seemingly impenetrable jungles of the lowlands and finally over mountains that rose like walls up to sixteen thousand feet high. They had no airport, no seaport, no place for helicopters to land, well the first thing was to build a dock area and lay a road, both in the dock area in the mangroves and at the beginning of the road, everything had to be dropped from helicopters. , people had to be lowered from helicopters to sew trees and make platforms where the helicopters could land to bring. in supplies, they would take their people to helicopters, put them on a hoist with a chainsaw, people would get off the helicopter with their chainsaw on.

Now remember that you are landing on a solid canvas of treetops, so you would have to work your way down. to the jungle floor while the helicopter is trying to float and the teacher inside the helicopter is watching to make sure this guy doesn't start bouncing back and forth, you can get slammed into the tree, people have died this way . Crews cleared helicopter landing sites and road construction began. Workers came from all over the world to take on the incredible challenge. Among them was a young Indonesian from Sumatra named Ilyas Hamid. When I was selected to come here, I was a little afraid because I heard that there were almost no people in this place and there are also rumors that people in this area were eating other human beings, however, when I shared my concern with my family, they gave me their support and told me to leave my faith in God.

Engineers dredged tons of gravel from river beds trying to create a road foundation in the worst places, up to 50 cubic yards of gravel were needed to build one foot of road overnight, while the builders slept. The road they had built the day before often sank into the swamp in places where Bechdel built two. miles of road for every mile that survived working in this place was very difficult. I thought that after digging through three to six feet of mud I would reach hard ground, but in fact we were still finding mud after having dug more than 30 feet into one.

One day we were only able to cover about 15 to 20 feet of trail as it inched forward. Ground slides. Buried tractors. Trucks fell into rivers. degrees, the tops of the mountains were sharp ridges in places only two feet wide with vertical drops on either side, but 25 miles of road had to be built over those mountains to get to Herzberg, if you're willing to put enough curves in S shape on the road can be placed on almost any slope, so the problem is to put the road along the grass ridge, now what Bechtel did was that very small excavators were lowered from helicopters, excavators that are the size of small lawnmowers, they would drop them. and these bulldozers would cut off the top of the ridge and then slightly larger bulldozers would come in.

Bechtel went through six size excavators between these very small lawn mower Thai excavators until they got to the big house sized boys they finally built. the road, so you started to have a flat ridge line and then you started going down curves, going down to the bottom, tremendously difficult, the bulldozers were falling over the edge, who knows where they ended up, the bulldozers were pushing forward, the drivers kept an eye on the vertiginous falls. below them and the other on the crumbling cliffs above no one knew if my life would ever live or die.excavator broke down and the helicopter could not bring a replacement part the next morning my friend an American whose excavator I was working replaced me as leader After only half an hour of work, the land he was working on collapsed and his bulldozer crashed.

He slid into a canyon as he fell, a tree branch impaling him right in the chest and killing him. In 1971, after almost four years, victory seemed in sight, but seven miles from Herzberg, the highway builders came upon a towering 2,000-foot cliff. Bechtel engineers had an ingenious solution: a helicopter transported a 9,000-foot-long nylon rope to a platform at the future mine, with this bolted into place. Workers lifted thicker and thicker ropes until the line was strong enough to hold steel cables as thick as a man's arm. This steel network became the longest cable car of its time and one of the steepest.

Their cars rose 600 meters in less than a mile, but no one anticipated the mysterious vibrations that shook their cables. The vibrations would be so strong that they had to stop everything because the aura cars would vibrate directly from the cable. They called a Swiss mathematician who said that these cables are like strings and a very fine violin if they are a little out of tune the violin sounds terrible recalculated speeds and tensions since then everything has gone very well with the tram in place free port was able to transport men and equipment to the entrance of the mine at the base of the mine tram built by bechtelooffices and an ore processing mill, after five years of fighting Aryan Jaya, the Erzberg mine was ready to operate at a cost of more than one billion dollars, but the Engineers had to solve another problem: how were they going to get thousands of tons of ore down from the mountain? 1972 engineers had faced the challenge of building a road through irian jaya miners were able to begin excavating the huge deposits of copper and gold discovered there soon they were extracting thousands of tons of ore per day but they also faced a new challenge: how to ship That row from the distant mountains of Irian Jaya to the rest of the world Trucks and trams could not transport enough ore per day to make Erzberg profitable Engineers devised a simple solution to move the ore, drop it The newly mined ore begins its journey to the world through a series of ore passes, these giant sprouts make it fall 2000 feet to the base of the tram.

When the ore hits the ground, it breaks into smaller pieces, making it easier to move. Conveyor belts rush the failure or towards a mill within the mill into which it is poured. The world's largest ore crushers, nearly 40 feet in diameter, rotate inside these enormous drums. Thousands of steel balls attack the ore, crushing it into smaller rocks and finally turning it into powder. Mill workers mix powdered ore with water to create a concentrated liquid suspension of copper. and gold, but this concentrate is still ten thousand feet high and seventy miles from the sea, gravity takes it there.

Mill workers pump the concentrate into a pipe that runs next to the road. After 20 miles, the descent becomes so steep that gravity alone carries the concentrate another 50 miles. to the sea stacked in oceanside barns waiting to be shipped to foundries around the world, the product of hundreds of millions of dollars and years of dangerous work looks like nothing more than a huge pile of dirt, but in reality it is dirt that pays when smelted, each ton produces almost 700 pounds of copper 30 grams of gold and another 30 grams of silver we mine the ore at 14,000 feet and sell it at sea level and that's a distance of 75 miles between those two no one else does that in december 1972 loaded the first ship with ore from the erzberg mine set sail from hirian jaya in the 1980s hertzberg was a huge open pit mine the ancient glacial prairie sketched by jean-jacques dosie resonated with the sounds of one of the most ambitious mining operations in the world, but Freeport knew it was as big as If Erzberg wouldn't last forever, the company sent geologists deep into the surrounding mountains in search of an even larger war body, a motherload that it would make mining and Irian Jaya profitable long after Erzberg had been exhausted.

It was dirty, dangerous, exciting work for a few exceptional men and one exceptional woman who we spent many times actually running to the helicopter, you would be exhausted and you would just go in and almost collapse, but it was either that or spend the night and it was very cold in there up to One night in the early 1970s, Frank Nelson was one of the first geologists to explore the wilds of Aryan Jaya and working with him was his wife Eleanor, also a geologist. Our first task really was to develop a first topographical and at the same time geological map.

We had one. camera that we mounted under the helicopter that Frank worked with a remote control and I took pictures with the handheld from the door of the helicopter, I would just open the door and point the camera and surprise our drillers, sometimes they would say who the hell is that over there above Ellie would be sitting on the edge of the sea with one foot off the edge and shooting down and trying to get a tile set up of the area and even these big tough Maori drillers were impressed by that so there it is. a great woman, people were not familiar with the natives and we were lucky to have more direct day to day contact with them and you really liked them, a lot of people were afraid of them, they looked quite dramatic, I mean, painted. faces and you know, bones in their noses and bows and arrows and they had a sinister look, but actually when you got to know them they had a great sense of humor, we used to ask them about fun and they always said well, no. us, but in the other canyon, those guys, yeah, they let you know that they eat people and they go there and say, oh no us, but the ones those guys had in the 1980s, the open pit mine of Erzberg was no longer profitable and was closed, but Frank and Eleanor Nelson and other geologists discovered huge underground copper deposits nearby.

It was a rich find, but it was not the mother lode Freeport had been looking for. In fact, in the mid-1980s, Freeport all but abandoned mining in Arien Jaya as new technology threatened to destroy global demand for copper fiber-optic cables and was revolutionizing global telephone systems. Many believed it would soon make copper telephone cables obsolete, but in 1984 a new CEO took over at Freeport. James Robert Moffat was a field geologist who had spent years exploring for oil and minerals he was not willing to give up on Arienjaya I believed in the mother lode I looked at New Guinea and saw Papua New Guinea with hundreds of mines that had been explored over the last 150 years and erian jaya basically with the little Hertzberg mine and it's what we call state line geology, it happens all the time simply because this terrain was so horrible in terms of trying to explore it and people left the border with Papua New Guinea and started to tell themselves that this state line really was some kind of geological boundary, well that's ridiculous, geology knows no political boundaries and never has known them nor will know them.

Moffett was convinced that there was more gold in the primeval hills of Irian Jayas and told his geologists to find it as happened some time ago. The Freeport geologist in Irian Jaya had been thinking about gold and looking at a mountain called Grossberg less than two miles from the Earthsburg mine every morning. He looked up and saw the outcrop. He'd see that mountain sitting there and I'd think to myself, there really must be something up there. It literally drove me crazy to stand at the bottom of that mountain and look at it and know that there was a rock up there that I hadn't been on and that It was an itch that I had to scratch and after about two years we finally got the chance to do it.

The rocks that Dave Potter collected at Grossberg determined one or two grams of gold per ton, which was enough to warrant further investigation. Potter installed the diamond. After drilling and core sampling the first one came back which was an angled hole going straight into the outcrop and not only did it have gold but it also had copper values ​​and for the first time I started to think that there is something more here than only one gold deposit, the one that really took it home was a third, the last hole we drilled went to about 1500 feet deep and of that 1500 feet, all of it, but about 90 to 100 feet came back with copper values ​​that In other words, they were on the order of one to two percent copper, on the order of one to five grams per ton of gold.

That hole was when I suddenly felt, Oh my God, this is big, big, was an understatement. Grossberg did the mining. history dave potter's hunch led freeport to a billion tons of ore, the largest gold deposit and the third largest copper deposit ever found, they gave mr moffat credit for holding the property when he could have probably taken 75 million of dollars for her and in the early '80s and He walked away clean, you know, Grassberg himself underground is worth more than 40 billion dollars 75 million 40 billion. Good choice, but as the first euphoria faded, a sobering realization set in as a wall of cliffs blocked Earthsburg's path from reaching Grossberg to extract its bounty. freeport would have to transport the world's largest trucks and shovels over the almost vertical cliffs of irian gia to a mountain even more remote than hertzberg erzberg engineers had achieved the incredibly difficult now in grossberg they faced the impossible grossberg is the biggest gold mine rich in the world is also one of the most productive and profitable that work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, its miners extract six hundred thousand tons of ore in a single day to extract this astonishing amount of ore, they must use the largest mining equipment in the world, gigantic bucyrus electric shovels that collect 80 tons of war in a single shovel and the komatsu 930, the leviathan of war trucks that transport more than 300 tons in a single load, other mines use this colossal equipment, but none has faced the task of transporting it over steep cliffs in a remote and primitive land for a mountain peak almost 14,000 feet high in the 1980s this seemed impossible Herzberg's tram can carry only 15 tons a kamatsu ore truck alone weighs more than 200 tons towering cliffs blocked the Erzberg road from reaching the Grossberg site in the late 1980s the Grassberg miners faced This is a daunting challenge and I won it.

This is the way of heat. Heat means heavy equipment access trail. The Heat Road is unlike any other road ever built. The heat trail begins at an elevation of about 8,000 feet and traverses the mountainside for about seven miles and out. At about 13,500 feet, some of the slopes exceed 22 to 30 percent and branch off from the main road just below the Grossberg, the heat road zigzags uphill into the clouds until it reaches the Stairway to Heaven at the Freeport of the mine, the largest individual contribution. The factor of this mine is the thermal rope, if we did not have the thermal road, the Grassberg mine would not be moving 600,000 tons per day today on this nightmare of a road, trucks and colossal shovels must be transported piece by piece, like this truck mineral. chassis that weighs 40 tons in places where the road seems to defy the laws of physics as its slopes approach the maximum angle that a fully loaded vehicle can climb, the thermal road should not exist if you look at the heat from below or even You know what happens when I take people on their first visit, they look and they just say what is that, what's going on up there, many said that this crucial road couldn't be built or that if it could, the cost would be astronomical, no.

They had counted on him. Veteran Freeport road builder Ilyas Hamid Freeport asked several independent contractors in Australia to give them an estimate of what it would cost to build a road and the estimates ran into tens and tens of millions of dollars. He heard about these incredible estimates and thought. For himself, this is crazy. I can do this for a lot less money than these people are asking, so his expat

super

visor agreed to let him try it first. My boss took me to see the situation from the helicopter. I told him the guy was just driving his excavator. up and down he took it for a while he didn't do it overnight he just zigzagged from one side to the other it was the hardest job I have ever done in my life the bulldozer was always in danger of falling because the ground was very slippery andIt had very little dirt at the top, so the challenge was very big when you drive a bulldozer on a slope as steep as a slope going up to Grassberg.

You can stop by at any time. He almost did it several times. Their nerve endings are much better than ours. feeling that fine line between tipping over on your bulldozer and dying and being able to make that cut where other people can follow you. That road was built for less than two million dollars. It's amazing only because of a guy who had everything he needed to go and drive his excavator from top to bottom. He's a quiet guy, but inside I think he's a tiger and loves challenges. He made something incredible happen. Maybe he doesn't know much about the world of physics. he just says: you want a path from a to b and I will take you there.

The path of heat conquered the mountains of the Aryan giants, but the slope is not the only obstacle to overcome at almost 14,000 feet operating one of the world's greatest minds is a journal. Dangerous challenge Most mornings start with bright sunshine, but at midday clouds roll in from the sea in a matter of seconds Visibility at Grossberg can drop from near perfect to near zero Most days Grossberg miners must operate their leviathan machinery and the fog is so thick they can barely see the 200 One-ton Kamatsu-hore trucks with tires as tall as a house could crush a smaller vehicle without stopping.

They now have very strict rules about what to do once the fog hits and have the lights on at a distance of x meters. any other truck gets priority and these safety measures are followed very closely, otherwise people would die everywhere. War truck drivers like alexander cromcion have been trained to handle dangerous weather conditions kalumang if the fog is less than 50 feet I park my truck and wait until it goes away although I am a little worried because the road is very narrow and slippery like many Crosberg employees. Alexander Kramcion is an indigenous Iranian. His truck driving skills are even more impressive than they seem.

He had never operated a vehicle before the company tested him. I, when I arrived on the first day of training, was a little confused, but I didn't find it difficult after that. 20 of my people are local Aryans, local people who had never seen a Toyota or a car before and they came up and We are driving 300 ton haul trucks, that is a challenge in itself and we are very proud of our workforce and I have worked in numerous mines and put my people against any other mine in the world that the Prosberg miners won. Work won't stop anytime soon Geologists believe the deposit is even larger than originally estimated and may still contain billions of tonnes of ore, but Freeport has not given up its search for new copper and gold bonanzas.

The search has sent geologists defying death. current exploration Grassberg mine remains the largest gold deposit ever found Freeport geologists continue their search for an even bigger one today's scientists have tools unimaginable by explorers of the past analyze magnetic images and high-resolution satellite photographs focusing on potential mineral bodies that call for hot spots without leaving the comfort and safety of your laboratory, but someone has to evaluate those hot spots and the only way to do it is the old-fashioned way. Jay Pennington's morning ride is a little different than most, we just get out of the helicopter basically two at a time with a sample pack and a survival pack and then go down the hoist one at a time, say from 120 feet, like this Like a 12-story building, the first time I was taken out of a helicopter was extremely exhilarating, scary, and fun.

At the same time, you must have the utmost faith in your pilot, the hoist master, who will put your life on the line for about 90 seconds, and then in the people who maintain the equipment, both the hoist and the helicopter, so that you can overcome that and Let's face it, you can't do the job without that confidence as soon as you have the confidence that the rest can be as fun as you want. Exploration geologists like Jay Pennington are on the front lines of Freeport's search for the next Grossburg. That's a good thing despite all the high-tech science that takes him to a hot spot Jay works with tools any California 49er would recognize Eight hours a day he pans for gold like an old west prospector in some of the last true wilderness of the earth many times when When you fall to the ground, you must feel that no Westerner or non-native has ever been where you are at that moment, so you have the potential to stumble upon a 50-ounce gold nugget and just as easily with which you can step.

In a rare venomous snake, when Jay finishes testing a hot spot, he radios the helicopter to pick him up and take him to another, but when a helicopter drops Jay off in the jungle there's no guarantee he can come back, you can't Fly if you can. I don't see, you don't play mountain tag with a helicopter, it's not advisable, there have been times where you end up in a cloud sandwich, it's okay, one can catch you from the top down or the bottom up and if you have a helicopter stuck in that sandwich you're looking for real trouble and then I'm there for the night and that's happened many times when you're stuck there it's miserable beyond all the adventure lies the ultimate dream even a bigger ore deposit than grossberg in 1994 Canadian exploration company claimed to have found it The Borneo bonanza had to be developed, but when Freeport geologists finally had the opportunity to test the Briak ore samples, they made a shocking discovery: What they found were particles of gold in that rock dust that were 10 20 50 times the size of the rest of the dust, so they were obviously salted the gold that we found in our samples that we had drilled and processed some grains of gold that we found were very small compared to what they found and it simply told us that someone had falsified the information by adding gold to the samples the briex gold discovery was a hoax the free port executives asked michael de guzman briex's chief geologist to meet with them and explain the falsified mineral samples it was d-day, that's when steve I was going to make the first confrontation and say hello guys you know what happens here, we don't think here at the level and he never showed up for the meeting and he never showed up after that anywhere where we had a message from Jakarta coming where they had heard that Guzmán had disappeared. he got out of the helicopter and he was the only person in the back seat of the helicopter and he allegedly opened the door and jumped out.

Indonesian authorities claimed to have found Guzmán's body and ruled his death a suicide, but some believe the case is not completely closed. About his remains and how they were identified, everything is very questionable. I feel like he's probably somewhere in the Philippines enjoying his money despite Briex's deception. Freeport continues to search for another Grossberg, a geological holy grail hidden in the mountains of Irian giants as true grail seekers those who have defied the search have transformed the country itself is so spectacularly beautiful that well, I always said it was a religious experience to go to work in the morning because the sun was barely hitting the tops of the peaks and it was, uh, it was just a wonderful place.

Some of the things I'm going to remember for the rest of my life and things I have a hard time talking to other people about are things like being in a helicopter at eight thousand feet. uh six in the morning and watching the sun come up over that mountain is magical it's just amazing when we were finally leaving for the last time Ellie and I were on the helicopter and you can hear this the whole crowd of natives came running. trotting along the wall all dressed in their best clothes, you're saying well, you'll come back guys, yes, you'll come back, I thought we couldn't look at each other.

They both choked on the way down, yes, knowing that one of the best parts of your life is over, so I think the men who built this mine are really an unusual group from the point of view that they were not only workers, You can find workers almost anywhere in the world. I think it was a vision. A vision they had, which I think was inspired by the type of terrain they were working on, no place has the physical harshness and splendor that Ariane has, it was really a challenge, man against nature, but nature in its most ruthless form, in its harshest form, I don't.

I don't think you can find any place on Earth when nature is harsher than this grossberg and erzberg will forever remain monuments to those who discovered them, built them and operated them, a tribute to human courage and determination who, against against all odds, they erected a superstructure. above the clouds at the ends of the earth you