by Jim Richards
We sampled as we went, although the going was slow in this rugged terrain. After some difficulty, we moved onto higher ground and made better progress traversing a long ridge, which took us into the next area we needed to sample. In the early afternoon, we dropped from the ridge into a remote valley with a pleasant creek about 3 metres wide.
‘OK, Somsak, take a stream sample here and I’ll do some mapping. Last sample, then we’ll head back,’ I said.
As I wandered upstream mapping the rocks, I was struck by two quite sexy-looking quartz veins. They weren’t big, just a couple of centimetres wide, but they had the colloform (stripey) banding that epithermal quartz veins carrying high-grade gold can display. I was interested and sampled them, but was not enthused, as they were small and the country rocks were not markedly altered (a lot of rock alteration is good, as it indicates potential for a large gold system).
I walked back to the others and Somsak beckoned me forward hurriedly.
‘Mr Jim, look,’ he whispered urgently and shoved the gold pan under my nose.
‘Shit, Somsak, that’s a one-inch tail. How much dirt did you wash?’
‘Just one pan,’ he said.
I was looking at an inch-long line of gold in the bottom of the pan, so the river gravel was probably running around 3 to 5 grams per cubic metre; it was rich alluvial dirt.
Somsak vainly tried to keep our discovery a secret from the local village porters, but they were already crowded around the other pan that Oum had been washing and were chattering gleefully, with Scarface looking markedly animated. I could also feel my own adrenaline starting to pump.
I stowed the gold in a plastic sample bag and grabbed Somsack’s pan. We rushed up the creek, panning the gravels as we went. The others followed.
Thirty metres upstream: 2-inch tail.
Sixty metres upstream: 3-inch tail.
Ninety metres upstream: 5-inch tail. Holy crap, I had never seen dirt as rich as this; there was probably 15 to 20 grams per cubic metre.
One hundred and twenty metres upstream: nothing.
We slowly panned our way back downstream, trying to find the hard-rock source of the alluvial gold. I reached the spot where I had earlier sampled the colloform quartz veins. Using my geologist’s hammer and a trowel, I dug up some of the gravel from just below where these veins entered the river. Everyone crowded round the pan as I worked it in and out of the water, throwing out the oversized cobbles and washing away the clays.
‘Look at the gold. It’s everywhere!’ I shouted.
Coarse and fine gold speckled the pan, and as I washed down to the remaining fines, it got stronger and stronger. I was shaking with anticipation as I gave the final swirl to create the tail.
‘Mr Jim, ten-inch tail, very amazing,’ said Somsak eagerly.
I looked on in astonishment: the whole bottom of the pan seemed to be covered in gold. This was 1- to 2-ounce dirt (per cubic metre). I had read books about alluvial gold as rich as this and had always dreamed of finding some.
‘You are beautiful,’ I said to the pan. The villagers and my guys started doing a little dance for joy and things became quite festive.
The source of the gold was my quartz veins (and presumably a few unseen others); they were not large, but over thousands of years of erosion had been rich enough in grade to create this virgin alluvial gold deposit. I took another look at some of this colloform quartz, and indeed upon closer inspection, under a hand lens, some fine gold was visible. I should have spotted that earlier.
Automatically I did a quick calculation in my head as to how much gold there could be in front of me. I estimated that around a 100-metre length of river contained good gold-bearing gravel, it was roughly 8 metres wide (3 metres in the active channel plus 5 metres of older, now grassed-over gravels) and probably averaged half-a-metre deep (top of the gravel to bedrock). The grade was guesswork, but given the extraordinary abundance of gold in the pans, an average of 20 to 25 grams per cubic metre was possible.
So there was roughly 300 ounces of gold in just this small patch, worth around $360,000 at today’s prices.
I do admit that at this moment, my first thought was how to mine and keep this gold. I wished I had my old dredge there; I could have cleaned the whole lot up in a couple of days, even digging it up and putting it through a rocker would only have taken us a week or so.
Now I had a real dilemma. I knew from South America that this kind of rich discovery often led to some disastrous disputes. Unfortunately I was working for Newmont, in their full employ, and if I reverted to artisanal gold miner I would be seriously compromising the company and that would be dishonest. Not to mention the trouble that could rain down upon us when the military, which ran a nice line in controlling this kind of operation, got wind of what had happened.
I was sorely tempted, but my moral compass slowly swung the right way. It helped that we had no real mining gear, camping equipment or food and, as if on cue, the rain started tumbling down.
Somsak, Oum and I formed a huddle to discuss what we should do next. I looked over Somsak’s shoulder at the three local men. They were looking at me; their body language had completely changed and now looked threatening. Boy, this party had really died.
Previously the villagers had been friendly and talkative; now they fingered their machetes and looked at us in a menacing way that said that we should depart as soon as possible. A new reality was dawning and I didn’t fancy our geo-picks versus their machetes. If there had been 3,000 ounces in that river, not 300, it might have been a different story. Despite the temptation gnawing at me to stay, I made the painful decision.
‘Somsak, pack up the samples, we’re going back to the village.’
‘But what about the gold, Mr Jim?’ asked Somsak mournfully.
‘It’s not our gold, Somsak. We found it, but it’s Newmont’s and they will definitely not want us starting up a busted-arse mining operation on our own initiative. They’re paying us to find three million ounces, not three hundred. Let’s go.’
Scarface said they were staying and insisted on payment for the day, which I was happy to hand over, just to get rid of the guy.
Our trip back to the village was tricky. We had a lot of weight as we had to carry all of our own samples. We made it just as it got dark. I ordered our gear to be packed up and we left in the truck to stay the night in Ban Done. I didn’t want Scarface returning later in the night to surprise us.
In the scheme of things, this find, although attention-grabbing, was of no significance to a large company like Newmont. Nevertheless, it was amazing that the locals did not know about it, as they hunted animals there. But there was little tradition of alluvial gold mining in this particular region.
This changed as news of our discovery leaked out. We continued our sampling work in the surrounding areas and kept up with reports of what was happening to our discovery, which we had named Huai Ngam (beautiful creek).
The story recounted to us was that the day following the discovery, Scarface and his crew had returned to their homes to get food and equipment. One of them must have let slip about the gold discovery because the whole village rushed the creek, followed by the populace of the surrounding area. In two weeks they had picked the river clean.
Sometime later, we returned to Huai Ngam to do some follow-up mapping and to check there was not a large hard-rock gold system we might have missed.
There was now a well-trodden path to the site and, when we arrived, our creek was beautiful no more. It had been transformed into a moonscape of turned-over gravels, dams and pits. I didn’t feel too bad about this, as the area affected was so tiny relative to the rest of the forest that the vegetation would quickly recover. My little quartz veins and a few other associated stringers had been gouged out, and despite a thorough search in the vicinity, we didn’t find any more mineralisation of note.
That was it: the only gold rush I ever started and, just like James Marshall, the man who sparked the California Gold Rush, I
didn’t make a damn thing out of it.
I did learn something from this episode, though. Do not assume someone else will always have found something great before you have your go.
After the regional sampling program was completed, I spent a couple of months on a project called Poung Lac. In geology terms, this was a Carlin-style gold project. This style of gold occurrence is named after the Carlin district of Nevada, USA, one of the world’s most prolific gold-producing regions.
The fortunes of two giant gold-mining companies, Newmont and Barrick, have been built from mines on the Carlin trend. Around 5 million ounces per year (worth $6 billion) is currently produced from the area.
The discovery of Carlin was made in the years 1961 and 1962 by a team (and it almost always is a team) within which Newmont geologist Alan Coope played a most prominent role.
Coope still worked for Newmont when I was there. When he came to Laos to review our data, he shared with us the discovery of the fabulous mines at Carlin. Exploration geologists love a good discovery story, and this one did not disappoint.
Carlin-style gold mineralisation was unlike any other found before. Despite the high grades of up to 2 ounces per tonne, the gold was extremely fine-grained and invisible to the naked eye. Furthermore, the gold was in rocks that did not appear mineralised: massive, grey, sooty, porous, dirty-looking limestones. It was only when Alan Coope took float samples of this innocent-looking material that the initial discovery was made.
Inspired by Coope’s tale, I got stuck into Newmont’s project at Poung Lac, an outstandingly scenic spot surrounded by karstic limestone mountains.
Poung Lac village was a welcoming place and I got to know some of the locals reasonably well. The older residents were still scarred from the forced farm collectivisations imposed on them some fifteen years earlier. This madness had resulted in mass famine across the country and there was a real hatred towards the Pathet Laos by many rural people.
After a month of intensive activity, trenching, mapping and sampling, I was still struggling to work out the geology. I stood in one of the trenches with Simon Yardley, looking directly at a seemingly uninteresting siltstone, which our assays told us was full of gold. Simon pointed to the main sedimentary layer, about a metre thick.
‘Take a good look under your hand lens, Jim. What do you see?’ he said.
I looked. ‘Grey, sooty, porous, massive crap.’
‘The perfect description of Carlin-style gold mineralisation,’ Simon said.
You couldn’t argue with that. I looked a bit closer using my hand lens, and sure enough the rock was altered, slightly silicified and porous. It was an instructive moment. When you are seeking something and you don’t know what it looks like, it is hard to spot – even when it is staring you in the face.
Field experience looking at many different mines, rocks and styles of mineralisation is invaluable. You don’t see with your eyes, you see with your brain, and I wasn’t thinking. To find an orebody (or anything!), it helps to first visualise it in your mind, imagining what it might look like. Try it the next time you have lost something in your house.
Another conundrum of this project was the central valley. This flat area was littered with mineralised boulders – float – sitting on top of the soil. Some of the Newmont geologists had been salivating over the size of a possible underlying orebody that could have given rise to this scenario.
A drilling program showed that this optimism was unfounded. The mineralised float was in fact left behind from the erosion of a narrow, shallowly dipping gold-rich vein on one side of the valley.
Imagine you projected that original vein 300 metres higher (as it once had been), and then eroded the valley floor by that 300 metres (as it was now). You were left with the current situation, an array of resistant gold-rich float littering the entire valley floor where it had fallen during the various periods of erosion.
But this scenario is misleading: there is no gold-rich material beneath the extensive mineralised float; it is barren ground, a trap for amateur players.
This type of reconstruction of past landforms and the processes that formed them is the science of geomorphology, a subject related to geology and a critical one to master for the exploration geologist. A good understanding of geomorphology can save you walking down expensive dead ends for years.
So Poung Lac fell over as a gold project. I was not unhappy with this outcome. It was such an attractive spot, with its steep mountains and two clear rivers running through the connecting pair of deep valleys. Open-pit mining would have trashed the place.
There is a balance to be struck between the benefits of mining development and the protection of the environment, with local people being winners or losers depending on the deal. For the relatively small area that is environmentally damaged by mining, much human benefit can accrue. In contrast, agriculture usually requires vast areas of deforestation for far less benefit.
For example, a sizeable gold mine producing more than 200,000 ounces per annum (worth $240 million), might require 3 square kilometres of forest clearing. There could be two or three such mines in any one developing nation or region. On the other hand, palm-oil plantations in Indonesia alone have accounted for roughly 100,000 square kilometres of cleared rainforest. That is 10,000 times more clearing for Indonesian palm oil than for a decent-sized gold mine.
I believe that well-executed mining does more good than harm and, ironically, it can better protect the environment through providing taxes, education, skilled jobs and effective conservation programs. Inappropriate mining, on the other hand, is more problematic. The large artisanal mining sector can be especially harmful, leaving mercury in rivers and exploiting vulnerable indigenous groups.
In my experience, the most damaging part of building a new mine in an area of rainforest is incidental. It is the building of the road to service the mine that allows general access to previously inaccessible forest and enables (usually illegal) logging and agriculture. For this reason, there are some mines that should never have been built: Grasberg on Irian Jaya in Indonesia and Ok Tedi in Papua New Guinea spring to mind.
Logging and agriculture make poisonous bedfellows. In Laos, I witnessed loggers opening up untouched forest. They were followed up by itinerant farmers who entered this now compromised habitat and burned off all that remained.
These farmers then planted hill rice, which grows for about three seasons before the soil gives out. At this point they moved on to the next area to be burned. They left behind them a deforested wasteland of erosion, silted rivers and bamboo.
This whole destructive process was further expedited by Australian government aid money, which I learned was used in the 1990s to build the Friendship Bridge that connected Laos and Thailand. Each morning, logging trucks queued up as far as the eye could see on the Laotian side of that bridge waiting for it to open. There was nothing left to log on the Thai side, where the forests had already been destroyed.
My final trip up the Mekong was almost a one-way journey. Feeling ill during sampling, I returned to the riverboat that was our mobile base. I went downhill from there and spent the boat journey back to Vientiane with intermittent high fevers. I had dengue fever – also known as break-bone fever, due to the excruciating pain in your joints.
By the time we reached Vientiane three days later I had to be carried off the boat, and had lost so much weight you could shine a torch right through my torso. I really did need to get out of the tropics for a while.
I spent my last four months in Laos mainly in the office writing up all the various reports required for the government and for Newmont. This was good for my social life, if not for my liver.
The project was winding up; Newmont had not found anything of significance. That honour had gone to CRA (now part of Rio Tinto), which had discovered a juicy copper-gold mine on a superior concession area that they had pegged in the south of the country.
My time in Laos ended with a nasty incident. I was seeing the second
secretary at the French embassy at the time. She was an elegant Frenchwoman who had a house on the banks of the Mekong River.
We were outside her house on an evening that happened to coincide with the anniversary of the founding of the Laotian communist state. The Hmong rebels would often commemorate this day with a cross-border, shoot-’em-up raid across the river from Thailand and a bombing or two. So things were a little tense.
My girlfriend and I were enjoying a romantic moment beside the Mekong River, when I was tapped on the shoulder. I turned around and there was a short, malevolent-looking, bug-eyed Laotian man who stank of alcohol.
‘What are you doing?’ he shouted at me in Pasa Lao, as he leered at my girlfriend.
‘Fuck off,’ I replied in Pasa Lao, or what I thought was fuck off.
I gave him a quick shove to help him on his way and got back to work.
About ten minutes later a car pulled up and out came five men, all armed with either pistols or folding stock Kalashnikovs. My bug-eyed friend was apparently their leader and he approached, pointing a pistol at me. He had the triumphant look of a man about to claim revenge. I had just met the dreaded Laotian secret police.
The order was given to me by Bug Eye.
‘Get in the car, we go to Samkhe, her too,’ he said in Pasa Lao.
Samkhe was a place that was definitely on my Do Not Visit list. As Dao had explained to me some time earlier, Samkhe Prison was torture central. First up would be a bucket of cold salty water tipped over your naked body, followed by electric shocks to the bollocks, and then they would just take it from there. This was not a place I wanted to end up, far less with a woman in tow. I dreaded to think what they would do to her; indeed, she may have been what Bug Eye had come back for.
I had to remain calm. Together they looked a nasty, brutish bunch, and even the others seemed wary of Bug Eye. This made sense, as he was not only drunk and armed, but was also acting in an unpredictable manner, which further added to his menace.
