lilorphanannie
Full Member
- Apr 19, 2008
- 173
- 517
Platinum- for nine years I worked for an international exploration company. I it was a small operation but with offices in Caracas ,Venezuela and Guadalajara ,Jalisco Mexico for a while. I pretty much in charge of that area. My employer being European and fluent in Russian, focused on Russia ,Siberia and Kamchatka. I was called in and to my surprise my boss asked me to accompany him on a trip to a platinum deposit located on the eastern side of the Ural mountains . This platinum placer was part of a gulag labor camp from former communist Russia. It was now (in the 1995) open up to foreign investment and a client was paying my employer, a highly regarded and published doctor of economic geology to do a preliminary look see mission and proceed from there. The area was extremely remote and there was a sense of gloom from the past that one could not deny. We stayed there two weeks and moved back and forth daily from a little village about 30 miles south of the site. Accommodations at the village were a rooming house essentially a room in an old farmhouse rented out. They also provided meals. One evening our driver showed up and had a person with him. I could not understand a word , but the Dr. told me to hurry up ,that we were going to meet someone in the village. We drove out to a very sturdy little wooden shack on the edge of the town and were introduced to an elderly old man. This old man was a former university professor and political prisoner who worked the placer mine at the prison camp. They talked for hours nonstop and I just sat there trying to stay warm. Finally the old man rose up from the chair where he sat and my boss instructed me to pull the chair out away from the corner where it was pushed into. Then he told me to bring out what was behind the chair into the light. At first I thought it was a brass looking trashcan, it was about 20 inches in height and had a diameter large enough where my fist would easily fit. I could not pinch the sides and lift it. I eventually tilted it got my fingers underneath and cradled it. I think it had to have weighed over 120 pounds. We laid out a heavy jacket on the floor and poured out hundreds of platinum nuggets. The old man said that as a form of silent protest ,when the opportunity arose they would hide the large nuggets that they could recover by hand and secret them at a pre-arranged site. He was one of the few who survived. Not having any family he moved to this village closest to the mine with the intention to return and recover the platinum the prisoners had hidden. The empty artillery shell was what he had recovered so far. He told us there was much more. The largest nuggets were the size of a clove of garlic and the smallest the size of a bean. The old man gave each of us a nugget, my boss tried to pay him something but he refused to accept. The plan was to return if our client decided to follow through with the project and through him we would purchase the nuggets. My boss , who has much experience in Russia said we would never be able to export them without a mining license. Besides we were looking at one to two thousand ounces of nuggets. I have no idea what happened after that. This exploration company closed operations in Latin America and I was let go. I understood that the group interested in the platinum placer chose another deposit . The old ex prisioner/miner would be over 100 years old by now. There are almost no metal detectors in Russia at least at that time. And almost no legal way to get that amount of nuggets out of the country without connections. But it had to be one of the largest collections of platinum nuggets ever assembled. At any rate it was an amazing trip. We stopped at another old mining town ,where we were able to buy some rare gem quality alexandrite and my employer also bought a sable coat for his wife.