Horsepack trip to Pachuy

Horses hurt.

We spent 22 hours in 2.5 days on them in order to get up and down the Pachuy River canyon. But it was worth it; we needed to see the crest of the watershed where Barrick is currently exploring for another mine at the top of the Huasco Valley.

Miguel Salazar led our trip of three horses and La Mula - the pack mule. Miguel, about 50 years old, has always lived in Chollay, the tiny and final town before arriving at the Barrick gate. Miguel lives in his family's mud brick house with his mother, uncle and young son, Javier. They have been farming and raising livestock in the valley for multiple generations. Miguel is a farmer-cowboy. He spends part of his time managing a nearby small farm and the rest of his days riding his horse up the Pachuy to check on his livestock - mainly goats.

Javier greets us at their gate and we immediately head to the best pool in the valley. Just before entering the larger Chollay River, the Pachuy River slows to a clear, deep pool that looks black in the dusky light. A few rocks make perfect diving boards and we have the place to ourselves this evening. Javier is a smart kid and hopes to follow his brother to study in a university. Currently, Javier attends the secondary school in El Transito, a 45-minute bus ride down the valley that requires him to stay in the dorms like a boarding school. It costs $2,000 a year but Miguel works hard and intends to fully educate his boys.

As we ate our rice and bread around the little campfire our first night up the Pachuy Valley, Miguel pulled out his ID card from when he worked at Barrick as an explosives detonator years ago. He spent a season working for Barrick in the exploring phase but he now speaks out strongly against the mine and claims to have recently turned down another job offer from them. Miguel fears water contamination, water loss, and the loss of valuable grazing "vegas" - the green patches of native shrubs and grasses that pop up around each bend of this otherwise bone-dry landscape. Once again, water sneaks out of small springs and maintains a steady flow down the length of the valley, even at the 14,000 foot elevations at the top of the valley. The vegas offer free summer grazing for the local "granados" who have taken their livestock up for centuries. Most vegas have small stone structures, some with thatch roofs and more developed rooms, where the granados spend the day and sometimes multiple nights while tending to their herds.

Barrick says it has organized the granados who historically used the Chollay Valley, which has been blocked for almost a decade. But a long time passed at the beginning when the road was totally off limits, so some cowboys took their herds elsewhere - the Pachuy - or moved into another form of living, perhaps agriculture. Barrick now works with the certain families offering vaccination programs and entrance into the blocked Chollay within a very structured system.

By noon the second day we make it to the top of the Pachuy Valley and see Barrick's exploration roads across the expansive valley surrounded by red and maroon peaks that crown the drainage. Water trickles down the small gullies and joins to form a creek with vegas down the middle of the open valley. A dozen horses graze in one vega. We hang out for photos, documenting what might soon be another open-pit mine surrounded by roads and bulldozers diging for bracelets and earrings.

Pascua Lama site

Good visit to the mine site the last two days. Awaiting release of photos and text from Barrick before sharing images/description.

Pascua Lama

We met with Ron Kettles, director of the Pascua Lama project, last week in La Serena. Ron took the time to show us the main map of the Pascua Lama project. He also gave us a thorough description of the operating system planned for the cross-border (Chile-Argentina) mine. We are now prepared to fly up to the Pascua Lama site for three days beginning tomorrow. We are fortunate to have the chance to see the site first-hand and take photos of the area. It seems as if the project has some innovative approaches regarding the delicate issue of water usage, so we look forward to posting photos and video of the site next week.

Center Street Photo Team

We just got word from Sarah Johnson, a Birmingham instructor helping us with the Center Street Photography Team. Apparently, she helped five of the students submit photos to the Alabama PTA photo contest.

Turned out to be a successful last-minute job: Camille won 1st place, Jeremy took 2nd, and Sam 3rd!

Great work, team! We´re psyched for you. Your work while we´re away inspires us down here in Chile. We can´t wait to see some new pictures and hear of the improvements with portraits and lighting. We´ll soon have a gallery of your work on this site.

We´re heading back into the Transito Valley to meet more people and continue gathering pictures and thoughts from the communities.

Landscapes

The clouds blessed us with a classic performance on our first full day up there. Since clouds are the landscape photographer´s best friend, we hope that the first day´s shots as well as subsequent ones of water sources will draw attention to the pristine beauty of the "cordillera" at these elevations.
(See photos below and continue for more photos and description of last four days)

Days 6-10

On Monday we were headed out of the Huasco Valley (scene of the Pascua Lama project and conflict)to get some perspective from above. We´d met many locals - at their homes, in their small vineyard, lounging by the swimming holes, and we´d attended a few small community meetings. Everyone we approached listened intently as we explained our goals for the project and why we were wandering their dusty streets like freelance missionaries. Getting to know the people and the overall lifestyle of the valley is important and we had to do it in an informal manner. Luckily, it worked and we´ll go back for more in a week or so. But... we had to get into the high mountains and with every road in the Husaco Valley either ending at a Barrick gate (2) or at a horse trail that would take 50km of walking just to arrive at any elevation, we decided to drive south and enter the mountains via a maintained road that passes into Argentina. So on Monday we planned to leave early for the 6 hour drive.

However... planning for a project like this - rural villages without communication and a big corporation with too much communication (i.e. red tape) - requires the flexibility of silly putty. On our way out the valley Monday morning we stopped by Sergio´s house (community leader, initial contact). He said he would be in Vallenar the next day for the first meeting with the water commissioner of the region. He invited us to join and film it, leaving a copy for him.
So we rearranged and found a danky hostel in Vallenar for the night (apparently, the prices for dirty hostal rooms are twice that of other comparable cities because the miners have spiked demand during their off-days. Perfect.)

We met Sergio, the community lawyer, and one other Huascoaltino representative at the city hall on Vallenar Plaza. The meeting lasted an hour dominated mostly by the self-assured explanations of the water commissioner, a Latin American poor-man´s Indian Jones in dusty leather jacket, profesorial collared shirt, boots, scraggly hair, and a beard over weather-worn skin. He leaned back in his chair and confidently told Sergio and the lawyer that the private property of Barrick or anyone else could not be interfered with. I get a little confused with Spanish at this level, but it´s not that simple with different layers - surficial land, water vs subsurface water - belonging to different parties. We taped and recorded it and gave Sergio a copy. Off to the mountains.

Leaving one valley, driving south along the coast and then back east into the another valley sounds easy but this country is long and drawn out. We finally made it up to the bend-in-the-road campsite we´d picked out from a map at 10:30pm. Real dark and real starry. A creek ran by our pull-off and we could see the silhouette of some massive mountains up the creek´s valley. Some large patches of white reflected the lingering light in the sky. Snow, glaciers, snowfields, whatever you want to call them. We went to sleep at 13,500 feet and less than 10km from the Argentine border at the crest of the Andes.
For the next three days (until arriving this afternoon in La Serena) we explored the valleys extending up into the bank of mountains that held the most substantial water sources. The landscape is stark and harsh. At first glance it looks like massive piles of dirt with some snow on top and a few water-filled gulleys and a baking sun in blue sky. But as we adjust, slowly to the altitude and the lack of any shade, we find rich extremes. The crumbling gulleys of brown and gray slate rocks descend to little creeksides covered in carpets of thick grasses and rich soils. Up on the banks 50 feet above the waterways little pods of green, like rough, prickly mosses, grow every few feet. Climbing higher, the grasses diminish but the water keeps rushing out of the bases of dry slopes. Little springs pop out everywhere. We climb further, to the base of the snowfields/glaciers capping the mountains and find more water, now flooding out from mud-covered ice layers, running down in Yoohoo-colored torrents before disappearing into the loose rock surface of the mountainsides. The water will reappear out of the hillsides in various outlets, filtered clear of the original silt and mud. Water pours out of these desert mountains.

While the crumbly, steep mountains, high elevations, and 14-hours of sun had their way with us, the trip was necessary for the project. We saw first-hand the importance of water in these mountains and their valleys. Although it´s not the same mountains, snow, or rivers as those affected by Pascua Lama and Barrick´s other projects (Pachuy/Chollay, Valeriano) the climate, topography, and glaciology are similar

Photos...

Outside Vallenar, the clean, family run Piscina Vallenar fills its 2 pools everyday with water from the Huasco Valley. The owner grew up nearby and now runs the popular cooling-off spot with his daughter. They fear the mining projects will contaminate the water and the overall quality of the valley´s agricultural life. To them, a brief increase in commerce/human traffic is not worth the long term loss.

The sun doesn´t stop for 12 hours straight on Huasco Valley summer days so locals spend a few hours a day lounging at the river pools.
Every kid we spoke with said they swim at least once a day. Maybe that´s why every kid we spoke to was strongly against the mine.



Grapes grow here like kudzu in the southern US. Many small family farms still exist, some of them exporting to the US.

Day 5

Tonight we are heading up to Laguna Grande. We plan to explore higher elevations for a few days. We are waiting for Barrick to grant access to Pascua Lama mine.

Days 2-4

We met Sergio in Los Perales, a small town in the green ribbon that makes up the Valle del Transito. We met him after asking a couple men along the road where he lives - "at the sign for avocados." We found the "Hay paltas" (palta=avocado) and walked down the shady drive to the little concrete house with a covered, tile-floored patio. Shade means everything here. Second only to water. Sergio greeted us and we began explaining our presence and interests. His two children, age 5 and 11, bathed in the narrow concrete canal below the patio. She had little green chunks smeared in her hair - avocado shampoo.

Sergio is the president of the Estancia Huascoaltino. This refers to a farming community of members living in the Estancia - like a county. Huascoaltino lands extend into the cordillera to the Argentina border. He got out maps, including a large one with crayon markings indicating the areas of gold exploration. Pascua Lama was not the only one. There are also Valeriano, Pachui/Chollay, and the big Morro project, recently bought by Extrato Corporation.

Sergio is strongly against Barrick. According to Sergio, the only meeting he had, as representative of the Huascoaltino Community, with them ended with Barrick asking what they wanted. Sergio said the community wanted only one thing... for Barrick to leave. Barrick ultimately put together an outline of the benefits for the communities. The Huascoaltino were not interested.

The Huascoaltino native lands once covered a much larger area than they now do. Through complex secondary titles, the government sold large easterly chunks (where the gold belt lies) to Barrick and others.

Knowing Sergio´s stance, we spent yesterday walking through Los Perales. Everyone we met, with the exclusion of one bar owner (basically the only bar, in the nearby town of Transito), was against the mine. They fear contaminated water and most of them had never met a Barrick representative.

Next, we head back into the valley and will attend the monthly community meeting tonight followed by a more focused meeting on Sunday led by a Spanish ecologist who will use evidence from other mines to educate the locals on potential hazards. From there we'd like to get higher in the valley to see the areas affected.

Day 1

We´re in La Serena trying to coordinate who to meet, when, where, etc. La Serena is about 5.5 hours north of Santiago along the Panamerican Highway. It´s very dry up here with a rugged, salt-sprayed coastline, some long sweeps of beach with good surf and a few very local towns where Chilenos on summer vacation run across the street in bathing suits on their way to boogie board. It gets dark around 9pm.

Planning has been difficult as it is hard for our sole contact, the Black River First Nations representative, Don Clarke, to get in touch with Diaguita locals. We´re finally making headway after receiving the name and location of a man in El Perales, a small town in the Valle del Transito. Apparently we can drive into the town and just ask for him, it´s that small. So we´ll leave La Serena soon, drive north to Vallenar, then east into the valleys draining the Andes and the Pascua Lama site.

Also in the emails was a response from Ron Kettles, Barrick´s Project Manager at Pascua Lama. He asked which publications we represent and indicated he had only been aware of a tour for Huascoaltino (Diaguita) leaders to see the site and understand Barrick´s water protection intentions. He said he could only arrange a brief tour for us and that we wouldn´t see anything interesting, with no villages in the site. He said flatly that there would be no ¨treks¨ on the property because the requisite medical services could not accompany us. This is not good. We want to get into the site - there is no infrastructure currently, just Andean high country, a few roads, and a base camp. Physically, it should be no different than traveling in the adjacent, open high country. Only this part is not open. Hopefully, we will work something out.

So we´ll meet Sergio in Valle de Transito. We could spend a few days exploring the upper elevations of the concerned watersheds.