The Largest Gold And Copper Deposit In The World | Super Structures | Spark

On a Stone Age island, at the ends of the earth, is an astonishing superstructure whose very existence defies imagination. To build it, men climbed mountains no one could climb, gave their lives building roads no one could build, drive the world's biggest trucks and shovels where they could not go, thousands of feet into the sky, into a deadly realm of blinding fogs and perilous quests for staggering riches. They did it all to mine a hidden fortune, a mountain made of gold. In our age of satellites, cell phones and cyberspace, there are still a few hidden places left on earth. One of them is Irian Jaya, born of fire, crowned by ice, where pathless jungles swelter in equatorial heat, where freezing mists envelop soaring mountains, and men still live untouched by time. Some 75 miles from its jungle shores, a wall of mountains soars to 16,000 feet, the highest peaks between the Andes and the Himalayas. Atop them gleams a natural wonder, magnificent glaciers spawned by the Ice Age some 15,000 years ago, only five degrees south of the equator. Just below these glaciers lies a wonder of man, two gigantic mines called Grasberg and Erzberg, less than two miles apart and nearly 14,000 feet high. Before it's exhausted, this megamine may yield more gold than the entire California gold rush. Many call it the most spectacular mineral deposit ever found. It's a mountain of ore. But it's not just that, it's also a root of ore. So if you had a tooth, you know, and you can see the part that sticks above the gum, that's what most people mine. But if you extracted that tooth and it's got that long root on it, we've got that as well, and it's also full of ore. So you're looking at a vertical mile of gold ore body. It's just incredible. Grasberg and Erzberg lie some 700 miles north of Australia and 2,000 miles east of Indonesia's capital, Jakarta, in the western half of New Guinea, second largest island in the world. Once a Dutch colony, Irian Jaya is now an Indonesian province and home of some of the world's richest deposits of copper and gold. But Irian Jaya is not surrendering its treasures without a fight. The Grasberg-Erzberg mining complex took 20 years to build, cost more than $3 billion, and took its toll in human life. At its dizzying altitudes, men must work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to make mining profitable in one of the most remote locations on Earth. The tough part about this was is that Mother Nature implanted this wonderful ore body at 13,000 feet. When she said, come get it, and we had to go get it. When you go up there to try to explain it to somebody, the best way is that you're going to walk away with your mouth open. You're going to be a gog. People are going to say, how in the world did you do that? This incredible story begins with one man, a Dutch geologist named Jean-Jacques Dozy. In 1993, aged 84, he returned to visit the mine his courage made possible. In 1936, 27-year-old Dozy vowed to be the first man to reach Irian Jaya's tropical glaciers. It seemed a reckless boast. Europeans had been launching expeditions to Irian Jaya's hinterland for 300 years. None had broken through the deadly labyrinth of jungle between the mountains and the sea. The only way to make your way inland is by river. Well, the problem with the rivers is that you don't know where the rivers are leading. This was a problem with the very first expeditions that came to this area that tried to reach the glaciers. They took the wrong river. They spent a year and a half trying to get to the glacier just because they took the wrong river. It seemed unlikely that Dozy would succeed where so many others had failed. But Dozy possessed a recent 20th century invention which lifted him over the jungle and showed him the way to go. Dozy had the advantage of knowing what the terrain looked like from the air. Once you knew the terrain, once you knew which river to take, once you knew the lay of the land fairly well, you could move a lot faster. On October 29, 1936, Dozy, two friends, and eight porters started up the Iqua River. They paddled to where the mountains began and started walking. We just walked up as far as we could, started cutting, followed the trail, made a trail, and the higher we came, the more tougher it became. After a while, they didn't know where they were anymore because they had aerial photographs up to a point, but then the jungle gets pretty steep and you're not quite sure how far you have to go. Exhausted as he was, the geologist Dozy took time to sketch a peculiar rock formation. You had a blackish, black rock wall, black mountain with green and blue large specks on it. And well, being a geologist, I of course recognized that there should be some copper into that rock, but at that moment I had to go on. Dozy had no way of knowing how right he was. In fact, he had stumbled upon one of the greatest geological discoveries of all time. Three million years ago, a series of volcanic eruptions injected riches into the mountains of Irian Jaya. The erupting volcanoes opened up cracks deep within the earth. Propelled by hot gases, molten magma from the earth's core flowed into these fissures, carrying with it unusually high concentrations of copper and gold. One of them was Jean-Jacques Dozy's strange black mountain, the biggest copper deposit ever discovered above the surface of the earth. Dozy collected a few ore samples from the curious copper mountain. On his field maps, he named it Erzberg, Dutch for mountain of ore. Back in Holland, he wrote a report describing his discovery, but his timing could not have been worse. Dozy published his report in the summer of 1939. On September 3rd, World War II began. While Holland suffered under Nazi occupation, the Erzberg report gathered dust. Twenty years later, a Dutch geologist gave it to Forbes Wilson. Wilson was chief mining engineer for Freeport, an 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 everything, and indeed he was in many areas. That's part of the reason I think that we today are mining in the Erzberg complex. Wilson was looking for nickel deposits, but when he read Dozy's description of the Erzberg, he forgot all about nickel. After Forbes Wilson read the Dozy report and it became part of his being, we can almost say that it became a holy grail for him. He was a man, 50 years old at the time, and a heavy smoker. He gave up smoking, got himself in shape, and organized this expedition. He had to find and see for himself Erzberg. On May 30th, 1960, Forbes Wilson plunged into the jungle, determined to reach the Erzberg. He asked his friend and fellow geologist, Delos Flint, to come along. Flint jumped at the chance to take part in the adventure of a lifetime, despite the perils of trekking through Erie and Jaya. The worst thing there were the leeches, and if you looked at a bush, the leech would be there trying to find something warm that he could attach to. We'd always get a few, and one time I found one on the roof of my mouth. If I hadn't been busy talking, I guess I wouldn't have had it happen. But leeches weren't the only unfriendly locals. Only one year after the Forbes Wilson expedition, the explorer Michael Rockefeller vanished in Erie and Jaya. Some believe the son of Governor Nelson Rockefeller drowned, or was killed by sharks, but others are convinced he was eaten by cannibals. When Del Flint and Forbes Wilson first encountered Erien's indigenous peoples, they felt threatened, but for a different reason. Even though you've seen pictures of them with their gourds covering their privates, the first time you see it, it's a real shock. You feel very, well, unequipped, as the way I would put it. They came in with all their finery and charged like they were being arrayed in war, which sort of gave you, you know, but they turned it into a dance and everybody was happy. On June 16, 1960, after 18 days of hard travel, Del Flint and Forbes Wilson found the Erzberg. A surface inspection convinced them that it was indeed a mineralogical marvel, thickly laced with enormous chunks of the yellow copper ore known as chalcopyrite. There'd be blobs that, uh, up to four feet across or perhaps even longer that were solid chalcopyrite, and when you saw that, it was just, you boggled your mind. When I first got there and got up on the thing, I just screamed like Tarzan, you got mine, all mine. The two American geologists had proved that Erzberg was really a mountain of ore, but Jean-Jacques Dozy had called it a mountain of ore on the moon. Who could build a mine in one of the most inaccessible places on earth? In the 1960s, Irian Jaya's mountain of copper and gold appeared as spectacular as Forbes Wilson believed it would be. Rock samples from Erzberg had one of the highest copper contents ever found. Yet no matter how rich it was, Erzberg was virtually impossible to reach. But on April 5, 1967, with authorization from the Indonesian government, 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 Erzberg, engineers would have to build a 75-mile road through some of the toughest terrain on earth. First, through the labyrinth of mangrove swamps hugging the coast. Then, through the seemingly impenetrable jungles of the lowlands. And finally, over mountains that rose like walls up to 16,000 feet high. They had no airport, no seaport, and no place for helicopters to land. Well, the first thing was to build a dock area and to put in a road. Well, both the dock area in the mangroves and the beginning of the road, you had to drop everything down from helicopters. You had to drop people down from helicopters to saw off trees, to make platforms where the choppers could land to bring in supplies. They would get their people into choppers, put them in a hoist with a chainsaw. The people would come down from the chopper with their chainsaw going. Now, remember, they're dropping down on a solid canvas of treetops. So they would have to cut their way down to the floor of the jungle as the helicopter tries to hover. And the master who's inside the helicopter is watching to make sure that this guy doesn't start bouncing around back and forth. You can be slammed against the tree. People have been killed this way. As crews cleared helicopter landing sites, road building began. Workers came from all over the world to take on the incredible challenge. Among them was a young Indonesian from Sumatra named Hilyas Hamid. When I was selected to come here, I was a little bit afraid because I heard there were almost no people in this place and also some rumors that people in this area ate other human beings. However, when I shared my concern with my family, they gave me their support and told me to leave my faith to God. Engineers dredged tons of gravel from riverbeds trying to create the foundation of a road. In the worst places, it took as much as 50 cubic yards of gravel to build one foot of road. Overnight, while the road builders slept, the road they had built the day before often sank into the swamp. In places, Bekto built two miles of road for every mile that survived. Working in this place was very difficult. I thought that after digging mud for three to six feet, I would get to hard soil. But in fact, we were still finding mud after we had dug more than 30 feet. In one day, we could make only 15 to 20 feet of road. As the road inched forward, landslides buried tractors. Trucks fell into rivers. Helicopters sank into swamps. And that was the easy part. 50 miles from the coast, the sheer wall of Erion's backbone rose up as steep as 70 degrees. The mountaintops were razor-sharp ridges, in places only two feet wide, with vertical drops on either side. Yet 25 miles of road had to be built over those mountains if Erzberg was to be reached. If you're willing to put enough S-curves into the road, you can put a road up almost any slope. Then the problem is to put the road along the ridge crest. Now, what Bekto did is, from helicopters, they dropped down very small bulldozers, bulldozers that are the size of small lawnmowers. They would drop these down, and these bulldozers would cut off the top part of the ridgeback. And then slightly larger bulldozers would come in. Bekto went through six-size bulldozers between these very small lawnmower-type bulldozers until they got to the big boys the size of a house, which eventually did build the road. So you started getting a flat ridgeline, and then you started going down in S-curves, going down to the bottom. Tremendously difficult. Bulldozers would fall over the edge. Who knows where they ended up? The bulldozers pushed forward. Drivers kept one eye on the dizzying drops below them, and the other on the crumbling cliffs above. No one knew if he would live or die. One day, my bulldozer broke down, and the helicopter could not bring a spare part. The next morning, my friend, an American whose bulldozer was working, replaced me as the leader of the work. After only half an hour, the land he was working on collapsed, and his bulldozer slid down into a canyon. As he fell, a tree branch speared him right through the chest and killed him. By 1971, after nearly four years, victory seemed in sight. But seven miles short of Erzberg, the road builders ran into a towering 2,000-foot cliff. Bechtel's engineers had an ingenious solution. A helicopter carried a 9,000-foot-long nylon rope to a platform at the future mine. With this bolted in place, workers hoisted up ever thicker ropes until the line was strong enough to hold steel cables as thick as a man's arm. This web of steel became the longest aerial tramway of its day and one of the steepest. Its cars rose 2,000 feet in less than a mile. But no one anticipated the mysterious vibrations that shook its cables. Vibrations would be so strong, they had to stop everything because the ore cars would vibrate right off the cable. They call in a Swiss mathematician. He said these cables are like the strings on a very fine violin. If they're a bit out of tune, the violin sounds lousy. He recalculated speeds and stresses. Since then, everything has gone very smoothly. With the tram in place, Freeport could lift men and equipment all the way to the mine entrance. At the tramway's base, Bechtel built mine offices and an ore processing mill. After five years of battling Eriongeia, the Erzberg mine was ready for operation at a cost of over a billion dollars. But engineers had to solve another problem. How were they going to get thousands of tons of ore down the mountain? By 1972, engineers had met the challenge of building a road through Eriongeia. Miners could begin digging the huge deposits of copper and gold discovered there. Soon, they were mining thousands of tons of ore per day. But they also faced a new challenge. How to ship that ore from Eriongeia's faraway mountains to the rest of the world? Trucks and trams couldn't carry enough ore per day to make Erzberg profitable. Engineers came up with a simple solution to moving the ore. Let it fall. Newly mined ore begins its journey to the world through a series of ore passes. These giant chutes send it plummeting 2,000 feet to the base of the tram. As the ore hits the ground, it breaks into smaller pieces, making it easier to move. Conveyor belts rush the fallen ore to a mill. Inside the mill, it pours into the world's largest ore crushers, some nearly 40 feet in diameter. Whirling inside these enormous drums, thousands of steel balls attack the ore, grinding it into smaller rocks and finally into a powder. At the mill, workers mix powdered ore with water to create a concentrated liquid slurry of copper and gold. But this concentrate is still 10,000 feet high and 70 miles from the sea. Gravity gets it there. Mill workers pump the concentrate into a pipeline running beside the road. After 20 miles, the descent becomes so steep that gravity alone carries the concentrate another 50 miles to the sea. Held in barns by the ocean, awaiting shipment to smelters around the world, the product of hundreds of millions of dollars and years of hazardous work looks like nothing but a huge pile of dirt. But in fact, it's pay dirt. When it's smelted, each ton yields nearly 700 pounds of copper, 30 grams of gold, and another 30 grams of silver. Find the ore at 14,000 feet and we sell it at sea level. And that's a 75 mile distance between those two. Nobody else does that. In December 1972, the first ship loaded with ore from the Erzberg mine sailed from Eriengeia. By the 1980s, Erzberg was a huge open pit mine. The ancient glacial meadow sketched by Jean-Jacques Dozy echoed with the sounds of one of the world's most ambitious mining operations. That big as it was, Erzberg wouldn't last forever. The company sent geologists deep into the surrounding mountains to search for an even bigger body of ore, a mother load that would make mining in Eriengeia profitable long after Erzberg had played out. It was a dirty, dangerous, thrilling job for a few exceptional men and one exceptional woman. We spent many times really running for the helicopter. You'd be just exhausted and you'd just get in and almost collapse. But it was either that or spend the night and it was very cold up there at night. In the early 1970s, Frank Nelson was one of the first geologists to explore the wilds of Eriengeia. Working with him was his wife Eleanor, also a geologist. Our first chore really was developing a map, first topographic and at the same time geologic. We had one camera that we mounted below the helicopter that Frank would work on a remote control. And I took handheld pictures out the door of the helicopter, just opened the door and point the camera out. And sort of surprised our drillers sometimes, they'd say, who in hell is that up there? They'd be sitting there at the edge of the seat, their feet off the edge and shooting straight down and trying to get a montage, a mosaic of the area. And even these big, rough, tough Maori drillers, they were impressed by that. That was one cool woman. People were not familiar with the natives and we were lucky enough to have more direct day-by-day contact with them. And you got to really like them. A lot of people feared them. They looked pretty dramatic, painted faces and bones in the nose and bows and arrows. And they were ominous looking. But actually, when you got to know them, they had a great sense of humor. We used to ask them for the fun of it. And they always would say, well, not us, but over in the other canyon, those fellas, yeah, they makan orang. Yeah, they eat people. And they'd go over there and say, oh, not us, but those fellas had. By the 1980s, the Erzberg open pit mine was no longer profitable and was shut down. But by then, Frank and Eleanor Nelson and other geologists had discovered huge underground copper deposits nearby. It was a rich find. But it wasn't the motherlode Freeport had been searching for. In fact, in the mid-1980s, Freeport almost quit mining in Erie and Jaya as a new technology threatened to destroy the world demand for copper. Fiber optic cable was revolutionizing world telephone systems. Many believed it would soon make copper telephone wire obsolete. But in 1984, a new chief executive took over at Freeport. James Robert Moffett was a field geologist who'd spent years exploring for oil and minerals. He wasn't ready to give up on Erie and Jaya. He believed in the motherlode. I looked at New Guinea and saw Papua New Guinea with hundreds of mines that had been explored over the last 150 years in Erie and Jaya with basically the small Erzberg mine. And it's what we call state line geology. It happens all the time. Just because this terrain was so horrible in terms of trying to explore it. And people quit at the Papua New Guinea border and they begin to tell themselves that this state line really was some sort of a geologic boundary. Well, that's ridiculous. Geology doesn't know political boundaries and it never has and it never will. Moffett was convinced there was more gold in Erie and Jaya's primeval hills. He told his geologists to find it. As it happened, a Freeport geologist in Erie and Jaya had been thinking about gold and staring at a mountain called Grossberg less than two miles from the Erzberg mine. Every morning I'd look up and I'd see the outcrop. I'd see that mountain sitting up there and I'd think to myself, gee, there really should be something up there. It literally drove me nuts to stand down at the bottom of that mountain and look up at it and know that there was a rock up there that I hadn't been on. And that was an itch that I just had to scratch. And after about two years, we finally got a chance to do it. The rocks Dave Potter collected on Grossberg assayed at one to two grams of gold per ton. It was enough to justify further investigation. Potter set up diamond drills and took core samples. The first one came back, which was an angle hole that went directly under the outcrop. Not only did it have gold in it, it also had copper values. And for the first time, I started thinking to myself, there's something more here than just a gold deposit. The one that really drove it home was a third, the last hole that we drilled, it went over about 1,500 feet deep. And out of that 1,500 feet, all of it but about 90 to 100 feet came back with copper values that were ore grade. In other words, they were on the order of one to 2% copper on the order of one to as high as five grams per ton gold. That hole was when I suddenly felt, my God, this is big. Big was an understatement. Grasberg made mining history. Dave Potter's hunch led Freeport to a billion tons of ore, the biggest gold deposit and the third biggest copper deposit ever found. Give Mr. Moffett the credit for maintaining the property when he could have taken probably $75 million for it in the early 80s and walked away clean. Now Grasberg itself in the ground is worth over $40 billion. $75 million, $40 billion, good choice. But as the first euphoria faded, a sobering realization took over. A wall of cliffs blocked the Erzberg Road from reaching the Grasberg. To mine its bonanza, Freeport would have to haul the world's biggest trucks and shovels up Irian Jaya's nearly vertical cliffs to a mountain even more remote than Erzberg. At Erzberg, engineers had achieved the incredibly difficult. Now at Grasberg, they faced the impossible. Grasberg is the world's richest gold mine. It's also one of the most productive and cost-efficient. Working 24 hours a day, seven days a week, its miners dig 600,000 tons of ore in a single day. To dig this staggering amount of ore, they must use the world's biggest mining equipment. Gigantic Bucyrus electric shovels picking up 80 tons of ore in a single scoop. And the Komatsu 930, the Leviathan of ore trucks, carrying over 300 tons in a single load. Other mines use this colossal equipment. But none has faced the task of transporting it up sheer cliffs in a remote and primitive land to a mountain peak nearly 14,000 feet high. In the 1980s, this seemed impossible. The Erzberg tramway can carry only 15 tons. A single Komatsu ore truck weighs over 200 tons. Towering cliffs block the Erzberg road from reaching the Grasberg site. In the late 1980s, the Grasberg miners faced this daunting challenge. And one. This is the HEAT Road. HEAT stands for Heavy Equipment Access Trail. The HEAT Road is unlike any other highway ever built. The HEAT Road begins at an elevation of about 8,000 feet and traverses up the mountainside for about seven miles and comes out at about 13,500 feet. Some of the grades are in excess of 22 to 30 percent. Branching off from the main road just below the Grasberg, the HEAT Road zigzags straight uphill into the clouds until it reaches the mine, Freeport's stairway to heaven. The largest single contributing factor to this mine is the HEAT Road. If we didn't have the HEAT Road, Grasberg mine would not today be moving 600,000 tons a day. Over this nightmare of a road, colossal trucks and shovels must be brought up piece by piece. Like this ore truck chassis weighing 40 tons. In places, the road seems to defy the laws of physics as its grades approach the maximum angle a fully loaded vehicle can climb. The HEAT Road shouldn't exist. If you look at the HEAT from down below, you don't even know what it is. When I bring people up for their first visit, they look and they just say, what is that? What's going on up there? Many said this crucial road could not be built. Or if it could, its cost would be astronomical. They hadn't counted on Freeport's veteran road builder, Ilyas Hamid. Freeport asked several independent contractors from Australia to give them an estimate as to what it would cost to build a road. And the estimates came in in dozens and dozens of millions of dollars. He heard about these incredible estimates and he thought to himself, this is crazy, I can do this for a lot less money than what these people are asking. So his expat supervisor agreed to let him try. First, my boss took me to see the situation from the helicopter. I told him I needed a bulldozer, mechanics and fuel. My boss said, OK, Ilyas, I give you everything you need. So the guy just drove his bulldozer from the top to the bottom. It took him a while, he didn't do it overnight, but he just zigzagged back and forth. It was the hardest work I have ever done. The bulldozer was always in danger of falling because the ground was very slippery and had very little soil on top. So the challenge was very big. When you drive a bulldozer on a slope as steep as the slope going up to Grasberg, you can go over any time. He almost did several times. His nerve endings are so much better than ours in sensing that fine line between toppling over in your bulldozer and dying and being able to make that cut on which other people can follow behind you. That road was built for under two million dollars. Incredible, just because of one guy who had whatever it took, brave enough to go and drive his bulldozer from the top to the bottom. He's kind of a mellow guy, but inside I think he's a tiger and he loves the challenge. And he made something amazing happen. He maybe doesn't know much about the world of physics. Maybe he just says, you want a road from A to B and I'll get you there. The heap road conquered Erie and Gia's mountains. But steepness is not the only obstacle to be overcome. At nearly 14,000 feet, operating one of the world's biggest mines is a daily dangerous challenge. Most mornings begin in brilliant sunshine. But by midday, clouds sweep in from the sea. Within seconds, visibility at Grosberg can drop from nearly perfect to nearly zero. Most days, the Grosberg miners must operate their leviathan machinery in fog so dense they can barely see. The 200-ton Komatsu ore trucks, with their tires as tall as a house, could squash a smaller vehicle flat without stopping. Now, they've got very strict rules about what to do once the fog comes in, having your lights on, being X number of meters away from any other truck, who has priority. And these safety measures are followed extremely closely. Otherwise, people would be dying all over the place. Ore truck drivers like Alexander Kromsian have been trained to handle dangerous weather. If the fog is closer than 50 feet, I park my truck and wait until it disappears. I'm never frightened, although I worry a bit because the road is very narrow and slippery. Like many Grosberg employees, Alexander Kromsian is an indigenous Irianese. His truck driving skills are even more impressive than they seem. I had never operated a vehicle before. The company tested me when I came. On the first day of training, I was a little confused, but I did not find it difficult after that. 20% of my people are local Irian people, local people who have never seen a Toyota before or a car, and they come up and they're driving 300-ton haul trucks. That's a challenge in itself. We're pretty proud of our workforce, and I've worked at numerous mines, and I put my people up against any other mines in the world. Grosberg's miners won't be stopping work anytime soon. Geologists believe the deposit is even bigger than originally estimated and may still contain billions of tons of ore. But Freeport has not given up its quest for new bonanzas of copper and gold. The search has sent geologists on death-defying explorations. The Grosberg mine remains the biggest gold deposit ever found. The Freeport geologists continue their search for an even bigger one. Today's scientists have tools unimagined by the explorers of the past, like imagery and high-resolution satellite photography, zeroing in on potential ore bodies they call hotspots without leaving the comfort and safety of their lab. But someone's got to evaluate those hotspots, and the only way to do that is the old-fashioned way. Jay Pennington's morning commute is a little different from most. We just pop out of the helicopter basically two at a time with a sampling pack and a survival pack, and then we're one at a time down the hoist, say, from 100, 120 feet, so like a 12-story building. The first time I was lowered out of the helicopter, it was extremely invigorating, and it was scary, and it was fun all at the same time. You've got to have ultimate faith in your pilot, the hoistmaster, who's going to have your life on the line there for about 90 seconds. And then the people that maintain the equipment, both the hoist and the helicopter. So you get through that, and let's face it, you can't do the work without that confidence. As soon as you have that, the rest of it can be as fun as you want. Exploration geologists like Jay Pennington are the front line of Freeport's search for the next grass bird. That's good stuff. Despite all the high-tech science that leads him to a hotspot, 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 on Earth. A lot of the times, when you hit the ground, you've got to feel that no Westerner, no non-native has ever been where you are at that moment right there. So you have the potential to stumble over a 50-ounce nugget of gold, and just as easily as you can step on a rare poisonous snake. When Jay finishes sampling one hotspot, he radios for the helicopter to pick him up and take him to another one. But when a helicopter leaves Jay in the jungle, there's no guarantee it can return. You can't fly if you can't see. You don't play mountain tag with a helicopter, it's not advisable. There have been times when you wind up in a sandwich of clouds, okay, either one can get you from the top down or from the bottom up. And if you get a helicopter stuck in that sandwich, you're asking for real trouble. And then I'm there for the night, and that's happened a lot. When you're stuck out there, it's miserable. Beyond all the adventure lies the ultimate dream, an ore body even bigger than Grossberg. In 1994, a Canadian exploration company claimed to have found it. BRIACS announced it had unearthed an enormous gold deposit on the neighboring island of Borneo. How enormous? 200 million ounces of gold worth $70 billion. As BRIACS stock skyrocketed, the Indonesian government asked Freeport to develop the Borneo Bonanza. But when Freeport's geologists finally got a chance to test BRIACS ore samples, they made a shocking discovery. What they were finding was particles of gold in that rock powder that were 10, 20, 50 times the size of the rest of the powder. So they were obviously salted. The gold that we found in our samples that we had drilled and processed, the few grains of gold we did find were very small, minuscule compared to what they found. They just told us that somebody had falsified the information by adding gold to the samples. The BRIACS gold strike was a hoax. Freeport executives asked Michael de Guzman, BRIACS's chief geologist, to meet with them and explain the falsified ore samples. It was D-Day, right there. That was when Steve was going to make the first confrontation and say, hey guys, what gives here? We don't think you're on the level. And he never turned up for the meeting and never turned up after that anywhere. We had a message from Jakarta coming in where they had heard that de Guzman had disappeared out of a helicopter. And he was the only person in the backseat of the helicopter and supposedly opened the door and jumped out. Indonesian authorities claimed to have found de Guzman's body and ruled his death a suicide. But some believe the case is not closed. The whole thing about his remains and how they were identified, it's all very questionable. I kind of feel like he's probably hanging out in the Philippines somewhere, enjoying his money. Despite the BRIACS hoax, Freeport continues looking for another Grasberg, a geological holy grail hidden in the mountains of Irian Jaya. Grail seekers, those who have braved the quest, have been transformed. The country itself is so spectacularly beautiful that you, well, I always said it was a religious experience to go to work in the morning because the sun was just hitting the tops of the peaks and it was just a wonderful place. Some of the things that I'm going to remember for the rest of my life and things that I have a hard time talking to other people about are things like being in a helicopter at 18,000 feet at six o'clock in the morning and watching the sun rise over that mountain. It's magic. It's just, it's unbelievable. When we were finally leaving for the last time, Ellie and I were in the helicopter and you could hear this woof, woof, and a whole mob of natives came running down the wall, trotting down, all dressed up in their finery. They're saying, well, you'll be back for us, huh? You'll be back. I thought we couldn't look at each other. We both choked up on the way down, you know, knowing that was one of the best parts of your life was finished then. I think the men who build this mine, I think, are really an unusual bunch from the standpoint that not only were they hard workers, you can find hard workers almost anywhere in the world. I think it was a vision, a vision that they had, which I think was inspired by the kind of terrain they were working in. No place has the physical toughness and splendor that Erion has. It was really a challenge, man against nature, but nature at her most unforgiving, nature at her toughest. I don't think you can find any place on earth where nature is any tougher than this. Grosberg and Erzberg will forever remain monuments to those who discovered them, built them, and made them work. A tribute to the human courage and determination that, against stupendous odds, erected a superstructure above the clouds at the ends of the earth.