Vamos, Adelante.
Here we go.
Parker In the belly of the beast.
All right.
Here we go.
Never so weird being in a cave at over 5000m.
We find ourselves in the funniest places.
This is special, isn't it?
Hey, look. Coca Cola.
We got the coca leaves out.
For luck and also for giving thanks to the land before they drill.
They put three leaves inside the crevice of the rock.
I'm going to put three leaves in the rock for good luck.
And there's a handful in my mouth.
Hey! Bravo!
The la vina de la vina la veta.
That is up.
There.
Is mineral. Oro vamos a la reventar eso vamos a reventar.
The idea is to detonate this one.
To remove a five foot square area of gold rich ore.
A hand drill is used to create a network of 12 holes four feet into the rock.
Each hole is then filled with 150g of explosives ignited by a fuse.
Mining directly at the gold source.
The miners expect to find almost five ounces of gold worth nearly $7,500.
And that's what they used to drill the holes.
La barra de, cuatro de diamante.
So they're going to explain you how to operate the drill.
That's my throttle.
Yeah. Yeah. You just turn this.
Open the throttle.
This one? Yeah. See?
All right.
So now we're going to drill.
Well, if it wasn't hard to breathe before.
No.
In the highest mine on earth.
Parker and Danny load the walls with 1.8kg of explosives, enough to obliterate a New
York taxi cab.
I've never set explosives off with a lighter.
Before, so we let the fuse off in here.
Yeah. Oh, my.
So we basically light the fuse and run out.
Yeah.
Fire maximum.
Three minutes.
Three minutes to get out of the front door.
Yeah.
So you don't run.
But you walk fast.
You walk fast. Yeah.
This is so wild.
So we are taking it.
We've got one, two, three, four, five.
Nine, ten. Like 12 lighters then.
And 12 guys all light at the same time.
No. Well, what happens when you light the first one and that goes off before you've lit
the last one?
Probably all of us standing here would die.
Who's that? This is it, man.
But you see.
Okay, so bend it.
Yeah. You burn it.
Yeah. And give it to the master.
Okay. So again, what are you going to do?
I'm going to.
Bend this over. I'm going to light that, and then I'm going to hand it to him.
Exactly.
Perfect. Leto.
Leto.
For everything in my body is telling me not to stand here right now, but everything.
I'm just like everything saying go.
Don't fuck this up, man.
Are you ready, Dan?
I'm ready, man. This seems so wrong with the lighter.
Fuego. Fuego. So.
No, No. Oh, it's burning.
They can't catch us.
Everything all right?
Yeah, but it's burning back.
And he has.
Arriba! Arriba! Arriba! Arriba!
Gotcha.
Vamonos. Otro.
Vamonos. Vamonos. Vamonos.
Let's go. Go, go, go.
Oh, my God.
Wait. Unless it goes off right now.
That might be the coolest thing we've ever done.
No, mate. Oh.
Let's get the out of here.
But just like I can't believe that.
Oh, man. Like you're saying, so much potential to go wrong.
Really? Yeah. Yeah.
We should.
With no machines.
Geronimo minds his river claim by hand.
Was he looking for Diego?
He's looking for a piece of wood to use as a.
To cross it. Ah.
I don't know exactly what he's trying to do.
Cool.
So what's he doing here? Diego?
Like, is the gold in that material?
No, I think he's building a riffle.
Riffle.
Oh, my gosh. Check this out.
That is the maddest.
Looking.
Sluice I've ever seen.
I think.
Me.
When I ask him, where did he learn this?
He said from the Incas.
How cool is this? We stood here watching.
Somebody search for gold in the same way that the Incas did.
The Incas developed a method of trapping gold in riverbeds by stacking rock known as Pirqa.
Now, 500 years later, Geronimo is doing the same thing as the water and gold rich
material passes over the rocks.
The flow of water is slowed, causing the heavier gold to drop down and be caught in
the small gaps between the rocks.
So it's like the most rudimentary hydraulic mining there is, basically.
Pretty rare that we see a way of mining that we haven't seen before.
Yeah, exactly.
And this is the stuff like in between the Rock when the rain comes up, if there's gold
in this rain will wash it down into his seat like he's shoveling it through right now.
Uh huh. And that'll all go into this sluice box.
The rock, otherwise known as the rock box.
Third generation gold miner Enrique runs the operation with his brothers and sister.
Their family have mined the area for over 50 years and are one of the largest operations
surrounding Kingsmill.
Oh, look at that color. That's good.
Oh, yeah.
They used to. Gold mine only panning, but now they have an excavator.
Wow. Pretty good to see.
Yeah, it's good to know that we're in the right area.
You know, where there's some gold, there's usually lots more in my experience.
Can you show us the operation?
I see.
Oh, here we go.
Our first proper bit of machinery.
How long have you been mining here.
Miss?
One month. Oh.
How's it been going?
20 to 30g a day.
Like one ounce a day, right?
Oh, wow. Wow.
Chunky. Sherpas.
Sherpas. Sherpas. Like the flakes.
They call them Sherpa.
I guess the next question is we might be interested in and being able to test.
Their.
Functional store.
You want to run the machine if it's all.
Right with him? Oh, yeah.
There you go.
Are you going to have a go?
I'm going to wash it. Nice meeting you, sir.
Just hope that I don't hit that and throw you off the bank.
Please don't. Wait.
Just like that. We're mining.
In Madre de Dios.
Parker and Danny are visiting an informal mine where a six man crew run 24 hour shifts,
producing on average, one ounce of gold per day.
This is all water powered, so they use water to suck up material.
Pump it up to the sluice box.
This plant is sunk in the ground 20ft down.
So they can pretty much do anything up here and the sluice box will stay exactly where it
where it is.
After felling the trees, the miners use a hand-built suction dredge, which acts like an
underwater vacuum to reach the gold rich gravels at the bottom.
The pay is sucked up and pumped over a series of screens into a sluice box to catch
the gold.
You ever seen anything like this?
Not really like this.
I think your sluice box is a little too wide.
Cut it down to, like, a third of a meter, and it will increase the water flow, and it
might increase your recovery rate.
Guys? Yes.
So much room for an accident.
Well.
Did you guys build this?
Hemos visto.
Claro. Everything by hand.
Wow.
Yeah. They designed it and made it.
Their own hand.
They have a brake caliper off a car.
The chain off of a bike hooked up to an extra pulley off the motor.
Oh, that's a diff out of a vehicle.
Yeah. Toyota.
Toyota. Toyota.
You can see the brand here.
Right.
So they can go down to 20 or 30m, but it becomes very difficult because of the water
filtration.
Right. Is there issues with like the government or the police showing up?
Yeah, they do have problems with the with the government and they just blow it up.
The government does if they catch them.
Yeah. Wow, that's pretty hardcore.
Yeah, it's very cool.
We're like, properly in the middle of nowhere, though.
What's that mean? Wow, That is a sharp machete.
Oh, yes. Here we go.
Muchas gracias.
Yeah. No, Lo una mas.
I'm pretty excited.
Yeah, like definitely an area with a lot of gold in it and excited to kind of see what's
here and how they mine and get to know them and their culture a bit more.
We're to master the mass.
C mass.
Ah, there you go.
They say that there's floods, and after every flood, there's a ton of gold.
That means that there's a ton somewhere upstream that has to be coming from somewhere
that's very rich.
So our conveyor belt, very smart.
So our ropes.
There's the ropes.
Yeah.
It's pretty satisfying.
It's so interesting. They just use what they have around them to mine.
They're using vines as rope and bamboo as the makeshift sluice holder.
I'm really excited to see how the sluice box does and how much gold they get in a day out
of it.
Let's see if it holds. Yeah.
We got a sluice box.
Like Piedra de Piedra.
We're stripping now.
Dan? Oh, what I'd give for an excavator right now.
I'd give my left nut for an excavator.
Normally, we're looking for, like, the lowest level of gravel.
And here it's like it's still that kind of flood gold that we're looking for.
Like the higher gravel.
Meaning this area could hold unlimited potential for millions of dollars of gold
every season.
Bert. Bert.
Oh. Oh.
Uh oh. Got a spillage?
You got a production line?
Diego's up there being the excavator.
Danny and Parker are.
Acting like the dump trucks, putting all the pay dirt onto our sluice box.
I'm doing a bit of classifying.
Just making sure the big rocks go out into the oversized.
Louis uses his hands and we just scrape the oversized into these tailings piles here.
Like. I bet their recovery rate is probably over 80%.
If I had to guess, they're going to burn $10 worth of fuel today.
The rest is sweat equity.
So yeah, you could scale it up like a mini excavator would do great in this, or a bigger
pump and some expanded metal and you could triple or quadruple your production or more
than that. But it depends on how much gold is here.
I'm amazed at the plans we had.
Further downstream, we spend millions of dollars stripping to get to ground like that,
and they're just scooping it up off the side of the riverbank.
Crazy.