In South Dakota: Gold Diggers of '79

By Madeleine Nash

A mile underground at the Homestake mine two men are at work, dim silhouettes beneath bright balloons of light cast by their head lamps. They are standing in a low, dark cavern, about 200 ft. long and 50 ft. wide, which is just now acquiring a festive look. Long blue and yellow streamers trail down out of the darkness from the jagged rocks overhead. Richard Aberle is patiently connecting up the streamers to make an electric circuit: yellow to yellow, blue to blue. They lead to detonator caps and charges buried deep in the rock by Aberle's partner, Jim Burns. As Aberle makes connections, Burns is busy installing more streamers. Most carefully, he places a single detonator cap on the end of a long air hose, shoves the hose into one of 800 holes, each one 9 ft. deep, that he has drilled in the rock above him.

With a wh-o-o-o-sh!the air hose sucks up and implants the charge, millions of ammonium nitrate pebbles soaked with fuel oil from a black cauldron near by. "We call 'em 'prills,' " Burns says, emptying another sack of the explosive powder into the cauldron. The prills look like a pile of granulated soap particles and feel rather like raw tapioca.

Aberle and Burns are about to complete five hours of work. Giving the cavern a last look, they scramble to a steel escape ladder that climbs straight up, 110 ft., through a hole bored in solid schist. Shifting from that ladder to a creaky elevator cage, they hoist themselves higher still. Beside the cage as it moves upward--to a mere 5,600 ft. below the earth's surface--water streams down the timbers used to shore up the shaft, acting as both lubricant and fire preventive. In the hot shaft it sounds, and feels, like a tropical rain forest. Shiny with sweat, Burns and Aberle leave the cage and head down another tunnel toward their blasting box. "Cover your ears!" Burns yells. Counting ten under his breath, he pushes the plunger. "Fire!" The explosion is less a noise than a huge impact. The force of more than half a ton of explosive rattles the bones. There is a short, odd silence, followed by a series of low, menacing rumbles. That means the charges have done their work. Aftershocks have shaken loose more than a thousand tons of gold-bearing rock from the ceiling of the cavern. Smoke tumbles up the nearby escape shaft, thick with the acrid scent of ammonia.

When the smoke settles, the miners must hustle down to the 5,900-ft. depth, work out under the cavern where the new rock has fallen, and begin hauling out stone, which is then hoisted onto ore carts for the long trip to the mine head. There it is pulverized, milled down as fine as flour, and the gold is chemically extracted as minute particles of dust.

Burns, 36, and Aberle, 27, are one-half of a four-man contract mining team. It will take them nearly a month to produce the 2,000 tons of ore needed to yield one 401-oz. bar that is "four nines," or 99.99% pure gold. But they will never see any of it. Even so, says fellow Miner Dan Cooper, a big Dakota farm boy lately turned miner: "People back home are always asking, 'How much did you get?' They think you just pick the stuff up and put it in your pocket."

Gold! It has again become the stuff of greedy legend. Once coveted by kings as a gift from the gods, guarded by dragons, bloodily pursued by conquistadors and hapless Forty-Niners, it is sought today as the world's safest and most dramatically rewarding investment in what seems to be a steadily sinking world economy.

In the U.S. the soaring price (once $400 per oz. seemed beyond belief) has sent squadrons of amateur hunters backpacking into the hills to pan for gold. Some of the great old names--virtual ghost towns since the price was pegged at $35 per oz. in 1934--are bustling with new business. Cripple Creek in Colorado, Sierra City in California and Virginia City in Nevada, home of the Comstock Lode, are opening or planning to reopen mines, reworking old tailings with fancy new equipment, moving tons of rock to get at ore seams that for years were thought uneconomical to mine.

The Homestake, by contrast, has been worked almost continuously for more than a century, ever since 1876, when two brothers, Moses and Fred Manuel, first stumbled on a promising vein of quartz in the Black Hills schist. The mine's total yield to date adds up to about 10% of all the gold ever mined in the U.S. (an estimated 325 million oz.).

The Homestake contribution could be encompassed in a solid gold cube 12 ft. to a side, worth at present prices about $10 billion. But at Homestake, the road to El Dorado is mostly dark, deep, hot and dirty. The gold keeps getting harder to find and the tunnels and shafts grow deeper and longer. There are now 250 miles of underground cart tracks, and some shafts plunge so deep toward the earth's molten core that the temperature reaches 135DEG F. Expenses go on rising. It now costs $200 to extract each ounce of Homestake gold. That is high, but at current prices it leaves plenty of room for profit.

Contract miners like Aberle and Burns rarely see the gold they dig, which is usually invisible to the naked eye. Like other miners at Homestake, they get paid only for the volume of rock they shake loose and ship out -- plus an hourly bonus based on fluctuations in the price of gold. (In the past month the bonus has nearly doubled, from 310 to 570 an hour. The daily gold rate, chalked on dimly lit blackboards deep under the earth, is watched by miners as keenly as it is by the gnomes of Zurich.)

For days spent blasting down the very roofs over their heads, for wrestling with boulders, some of them the size of a Dodge Omni, for driving 15-ft. rock bolts into the stone ceiling to keep it from falling in on them before blasting, Burns and Aberle expect to bring home at least $25,000 apiece this year. Team partners are chosen with extreme care, because sheer ambition is essential to success, plus the kind of skill that grows from aptitude and experience. "There's quite a few guys working their butts off and not making any money," says Burns. The alternative to working on a contract team is to hire out at a flat $7.50 an hour in support jobs like motorman or cage operator. Adds Burns: "If you're going to mine gold, you might as well make money at it." Aberle agrees. But as they call it a day after 7 1/2 hrs. underground and start on the regular 40-min. commute upward to the surface, he ponders some roads not taken. Says he: "And I always wanted to be a wilderness guide."

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