Marmato Gold: El Finale!

By Thom Calandra
thomcalandra.com

MEDELLIN, Colombia -- In this final chapter of our quest for Marmato gold, we learn that every story sells a picture. I was lucky. I had several of 'em, thanks to a photographer who snapped up a storm on that old mountain in the Colombian Andes.

I think Jim Marx's shots of our visit to EL Marmato, some three hours' humpy drive from the vivid city of Medellin, are remarkable. His photos show the mountain, the miners and the villagers just as anyone sees them day to day. (Photos by Jim Marx except where noted.)

There are no enhanced images, no staged shots. Not even the signature shot of the battered boots just below. The wildcat mills and the rock-hauling vaqueros and the careful mujer weighing the gold dust that scores of families sift and water-sluice off the mountain each and every day, these photos testify to the potency of El Marmato and the surrounding properties that a tinny (and tiny) Canadian/Panamian/Nicaraguan company and its Medellin affiliate are steadily acquiring in their quest for 10 million-plus ounces of gold.

Colombia Goldfields and its chief geologist, Jeffrey Brooks, are cobbling together a resource that just might ignite, once again and after decades of violence and poverty and apathy and narcotics, a run on the mountains and valleys of inland Colombia.

Our first three parts of this "Au Get Off Of My Mountain" series are available here at thomcalandra.blogspot.com and http://www.thomcalandra.com/. They describe the joys and pains of searching for gold in a dusty, renegade yet lovely spot just off the equator. (The mangoes, by the way, are to die for. Ditto the platanos y frijoles with sour cream.)

I need not describe in this finale the landslides that buried the town square. Or the resource estimates and geology this upstart company, resurrected from failed predecessors, is presenting in its appeal to investors for support. But please do read the earlier sections of this story for the details.

As many of you might know from my years and years of reporting for MarketWatch (the news pioneer I helped to start and where I dedicated 8 years of my working life as chief editor, chief commentator and chief gold nut) and The Calandra Report and even Bloomberg, The San Francisco Examiner and more than a few Gannett newspapers, I'm a color guy. I'm a teller of tales, all of them true, with the exception of my just completed novel, PABLO BY NUMBERS. (See www.thomcalandra.com for more on that baby.)

Numbers, even the numbers in that solitary work of fiction, while relevant to all of us, especially investors who work their bums off each day just to make it to tomorrow, the numbers hold my interest for moments, not hours or days.

The stories and colors and the food, the people and the flowers (orchids in the case of beautiful Colombia) and the fresh air, these are the essences that hold me and touch me and move me.

Colombia moves me.

The city of Medellin, a place of about 3 million, not counting the squatters from the countryside, is where once I taught English many years ago. The billboards proclaim: "Medellin el tiene todo," and it's true. Medellin does have it all. The orchids and the beautiful men and women. The luscious fruit and the sidestreets abundant with oak and pine and eucalyptus and ... well, cosmetic surgery clinics. Medellin has it all: the Antioquian
restaurants, clappy with courtyards and wicker, and the Botero swollen art; the dawn-to-dusk work ethic that sets this city apart from many of its sister cities across Latin America and the wide and spotless boulevards that resemble those in Madrid or Buenos Aires.

Medellin has it all. It has the traffic, for sure. The Poblado and other lush neighborhoods. The lore of that other Pablo, Señor Escobar the narco who for all of the myths out there deserves supreme credit for giving the world one of the great and years-long chase scenes in the annals of crime and commerce.

Medellin also has plenty of fresh air these days. The air is well scrubbed, a lot fresher than I remember it from the early 1980s. Cleansed I suppose by the afternoon thundershowers. Being up in the mountains helps, for sure. So do the cleaner fuels Latin America is using these days as compared with 20 years ago.

As for cowboys on motorbikes, well, this city has ALWAYS been safe. Unless you're a narco or the son/daughter of a narco. Or a politician. Next time someone says, when you're headed down to Medellin or Cartagena or Bogota via Miami way, next time someone says, "Well, be safe down there, Thommy boy," and I hear this all the time, you go ahead and tell 'em, "Well, and you be safe next time yer head to Rio D. (current murder capital of the galaxy), or to East Oakland or Detroit. Or to certain sections of Mumbai."

So enough with zee words. This final part, this ringing endorsement of Colombia and the small company hoping to make it big on EL Marmato, is about images. For those, I give thanks to Mr. Marx. He came. He saw. He didn't snore at night. He drank the water. We sucked on passion fruit. What a guy, verdad?

-- Oy! That's Jim (photo just above and right) in Marmato's ruined town square: one of the few photos I snapped with my own little picture box. You can see in the background a documentary shoot of the square, buried by various landslides in the past two years as wildcat miners water-sluiced the hill, then cherry-picked what looks (to me) like abundant ore on Marmato.

-- C3PO (here at left ) never worked this hard. Marmato miners and villagers fashioned him from bronze 20 or more years ago, and he still looks current there in the lonely town square.

-- OK I confess, for someone who says he is in no way superstitious (writing on the wall), I have this thing about snapping license plates. I dunno what it means. So
the buseta with the Marmato peak behind it is my shot. It's pretty country, even after three hours of humping and bumping behind big-rigs and waiting at public works traffic stops along the (very) busy road to the mountain.

-- Santiago J. Correa Ocampo is one of the environmental engineers in Jeff Brooks' concentrated camp of Colombian kids looking for a paycheck as mineral data processors and Indiana Jones wanna-be's. That's Santiago standing next to me (photo left below/the punk in red tee is me) at one of the Marmato mills that process rock and boulder with cyanide. The result: grams of Au dust that pay the rent, and put mangos, papaya and fresh apples on the table for the villagers who either have rights to parts of the mountain or those who don't but still heave rocks and claw at the dirt.

One day, after marching across the mountain, Santiago, protege of the senior geo, Mr. Brooks, told me something along the lines of, "You know, in the end, it's up to local government. If they don't care about what happens here (800 or so folks on the mountain), none of this will ever get developed. But if they care, and do something about relocating the village, then this is maybe the beginning of something very big." (Santiago, whose entire five word and 20-syllable name is available on request, didn't really say it like that. He said it like dees: "Joo no, in dee end, eez up to los hombres politicos ...")

Santiago told me the other day -- here in July as I add to this posting -- that the company is awaiting decisions from local government about how to handle the folks living on Marmato. He feels pretty good about the situation, he says, acknowledging this is his first experience on a property where land owners and villagers hold so much sway they can harvest their own gold dust legally and illegally - as they have for decades.

So that's about it, volditos mios. Hope you don't think I'm a mule-headed pinhead for following my dream back to a country that most Norte Americanos don't even consider for a beach vacation these days, let alone a mountain hike. If I'm right about this region's glaze of ore, I'll be able to buy my own Escobar-style finca in the Andes, girded by coffee bean trees and banana leaf. Dang that traffic, though.

-- Thom Calandra
Thom Calandra is of service at ThomCalandra.com.

Photos by Jim Marx, except where noted.

Do not use our images without our permission, por favor!

* Thom and his family own $45,000 worth of Colombia Goldfields shares at current prices. The Toronto company's stock trades in Canada, Germany and on Nasdaq in the USA. Thom and family have no intention of buying or selling any current or additional shares of the company until at least three months after this series on El Marmato is completed. (Umm, that would be today, May 19, 2008.) Thom (that's me) paid about $60,000 for the shares several months ago. He and his photograher (that would be Jim) have received no fee or compensation from Colombia Goldfields, unless you count some empanadas, some platanos and frijoles and three-hour jeep rides into the countryside.

Au (Hey You!): Marmato Gold Part III

By Thom Calandra
thomcalandra.com

Photos by Jim Marx

CAMP MARMATO, Colombia (TC) -- The mujer in this photograph is Omaya. She is weighing grams of gold dust brought to her by one of many wildcat miners on this mountain in Colombia.

Omaya works at one of several mills, legal and illegal, that dot the upper and lower halves of El Marmato, a mountain some three hours' drive from the striking city of Medellin. When a campesino brings his load of rock into the mill for the old cyanide treatment, Omaya can guess fairly well just how much gold will wind up in the bottom of the pan.

"Empirico," she says, meaning I think that she has plenty of experience. Omaya knows where the stooped and grizzled rock diggers work their part of the mountain. In a way, she is an empirical geologist, grading each peasant miner by their geography.

As the world of numbers and Canadian resource filings go, today, a week or so after we met Omaya at Colombia Goldfields' budding project in Latin America, I got to read the first official resource report from the mountain. The Toronto company* grading this mountain and adjacent properties just published its so-called 43-101 resource report, a legal (in Canada) sizing up of the number of ounces, the richness of the rocks, so to speak, and other geological assay criteria that are critical to making a gold mine a success these days.

The inference in the independent (independent of the company, that is) report figures 2.6 million ounces of gold for the mountain's upper half. The evidence comes from nine diamond-tipped drills boring into 12,000 meters of the upper mountain.

But I won't bother you with the stats. You can see them for yourself at the Colombia Goldfields home on the Internet. You see, I found Omaya's tipping of the scales much more interesting than the published report.

She had real gold running through her fingers, the old gal did. Hers was an exercise that many of the breadwinners on this mountain of 800 or so Colombians practice each day, heaving their canvas sacks of rock across the fire roads of the mountain. Degrading the steepest parts of EL Marmato with water. Crawling through makeshift holes in the ground looking for the rocks that will yield a decent amount of gold when the poor sods reach the mills.

Slicing and sluicing and eventually, causing landslides that bury the local hospital, the town hall and who knows, maybe a fellow countryman or two. All of that is in Part II of this series, in which I probe what is really going on at EL Marmato, in this Andean patch of gorgeous terrain not far from the city of Medellin, where I taught English a long time ago at Centro Colombo Americano.

I guess I was lucky in that I connected personally with the company's chief geologist, Jeffrey Brooks. He's been around the block in Latin America. Señor Jeff holds a doctorate from Washington State University. He seems to care about the mountain, about his small band of 30 or so mostly kids working the data on site ... and about the villagers who ultimately will need to vamoose from the mountain if what the company sees in this Marmato project comes to pass.

Brooks, updating me with his own interpretation of the independent resource estimate today (Monday May 12, 2008), was quite candid. Just as he was about the quality of the mango and papaya and platano at the roadside stands dotting the 3-hour drive to Marmato a week or so ago.

"Well, it looks like this," Brooks says. "At a 0.3 cutoff grade (minimum grade necessary to be considered economic), we actually lost tons from the previous resource estimate (1.5% fewer tons) but the grade is higher (1.05 versus 0.88 – 19.3% increase) and accordingly there was an increase in contained ounces (2.55 Moz versus 2.18 Moz – 17.2% increase). Things look pretty good to me."

I'm not going to travel the several iterations of Colombia Goldfields that go back to 1998, via Conquistadore Gold and other entities. It's all in the company's press releases. But I will say this, as I have before: several companies have sifted the dirt here in Colombia, a country known for its orchids, emeralds, coal and empanadas (my favorite). The country, before the violence that has consumed millions of lives during the past 80 or 90 years, and before the drug trade and the kidnappings and the political weirdness, the motorcycle assassins and Pablo E. and on and on, this country led Latin America in ounces of gold pulled from the ground.

Take that and sip it with your Coca Tea.

Still, the story of Colombia Goldfields and its small roster of Canadian executives, along with the London and Geneva bankers who tell the stories that raise the money for these mining endeavors, this tale is only as good as the heart you have to believe.

See, it's somewhat easier for me to believe than for you, volditos mios, to believe. I've seen and touched and scoured much of the mountain and the back office and the front office with my pen, my only prospecting tool. I've traced Señor Jeff's surveys in the gravel of the fire roads.

The company Colombia Goldfields, its young geos, senior geo Señor Brooks and the drillers and even the Toronto and Medellin and Panama City execs connected to the nuevo gold explorer, they all mostly having behaved in a responsible fashion, working with local government, hiring local talent, sheperding the young folks who one day want American and Canadian dollars in their ATM accounts, shuddering when landslides bury parts of the mountain's cottages, this company -- big sigh here! -- must once again turn to shareholders to raise the money it will need to purchase surrounding properties and keep drilling into some 60,000 meters of mountain.

You'd think that would be easy in a 2008 world of almost $1,000-an-ounce gold. But it's not. There's a ton of competition for the capital that yields Au resources. I guess that makes sense: companies such as Colombia Goldfields wanting to identify a deep-hole, or not-so-deep-hole, of mineral that it then can assign a dollar value to. And then sell to some vast mining company that wants to make a go of Colombia.

Even the company's bankers are frank about raising money via private placement, an exercise that already has happened twice in the past six or so months: raising several million Canadian dollars but also diluting current shareholders (did someone say moi?)

Says R. Edward Flood, a managing director of investment banking at Haywood Securities' London office and a Nevada-trained geologist whom I know fairly well: "We will have to do a financing to raise money for the Mineros transaction (purchasing a Colombia company with properties on the mountain). Since it is cash flowing we will probably employ some sort of hybrid debt, like a bond with warrants. That way the company doesn't take on so much dilution ... and frankly the mine is not being purchased for its production but for the potential resource it represents at the bottom of the pit."

For my money, I like Omaya's approach in her cubbyhole office. Omaya la mujer at the creaky old mill with the conveyor belts going round and round and round. That is, she weighs the gold dust, pays for it, collects the Au in a small cannister that looks like a film capsule. Hands it off to the owner of the mill,who happens to be mayor of the village.

As for the appetite for Colombian gold, investors today were almost surely nonchalant about the results from the resource estimate. The company's stock barely moved in Toronto and on Nasdaq and in Germany.

I could quote the CEO up there in Toronto, Randall Martin, but you know, he's much too driven to provide any perspective. I mean, like almost all top execs, he's out to raise his money and stitch together the surrounding properties and pay millions of dollars for other parts of the mountain. And then, he hopes, sell the lot to one of the big three gold companies who are desperate to land a foot or three and a heap of drill rigs in Colombia.

The laser-focus of a CEO in search of money ... well, put it like this: expect a one-sided tale that resembles a fable. That's his job. You'd have more luck ruminating on the bronze C-3PO the villagers have fashioned in the abandoned town square than you would taking lunch with most CEOs in search of financing.

Brooks, the middle-aged geologist and gracious host who hems and haws and as I said, seems to care about the stability of the mountain, seems to care about the 800 or so folks who live on it and really seems to care about the fruits and veggies his small band of planners and young folks eat each day at the company camp, put it to me thusly today: "We suffered from a lack of arial coverage in the drilling in the resource estimate. By this I mean that wherever we drilled we found Au (hey you!); however, for various reasons, logistics and time being the most important, we were not able to cover more of the license area. The drilling completed to date since the cutoff for inclusion in the resource estimate has been the same as the previous drilling – where we have drilled we have found Au."

From this, Brooks says in a bit of insight that is his own on-site opinion, the conclusion is "inescapable: we will add more ounces in the next iteration of the resource estimate. "

Oh Lord, let it be so -- this is what I want to say, pray/shout inside the little chapel the mostly Catholic villagers go to on Sunday mornings. But I don't say it or pray it. I've already seen Omaya's turnstile weighing of the gold that is peppered all over the place here. That and the sluices and the surrounding parcels and the 25,000 ounces of Au that already come out of this mountain each year in Barney Rubble fashion -- eso, es verdad! -- already have me looking forward to my next platano and refried bean with sour cream breakfast. Campesino style.

-- Thom Calandra in Medellin
Thom Calandra is of service at ThomCalandra.com.

* Thom and his family own $45,000 worth of Colombia Goldfields shares at current prices. The Toronto company's stock trades in Canada, Germany and on Nasdaq in the USA. Thom and family have no intention of buying or selling any current or additional shares of the company until at least three months after this series on El Marmato is completed. Thom paid about $60,000 for the shares several months ago. He and his photograher have received no fee or compensation from Colombia Goldfields, unless you count some empanadas, some platanos and frijoles and three-hour jeep rides into the countryside.

Au (Get Off Of My Cloud): Marmato Gold Part II

By Thom Calandra
ThomCalandra.com

MEDELLIN, Colombia (TC) -- El Campo Marmato, three hours' jeeping it from this emerald city toward the muddy Rio Cauca , is where our report continues.

When our story starts, when our search for answers to why Colombia no longer tops the heap as leading gold producer in Latin America begins, is open to interpretation. As is the rough-and-ready Spanish the artisan miners in El Campamento Marmato speak to negotiate their day's loot.

Perhaps this luscious country, 80 kilometers south of gorgeous Medellin, lost its oro mojo many decades ago, when the historically named La Violencia period of political killings began.

Or maybe Colombia lost the will to explore and exploit its thick veins of gold and silver, its disseminated mineralization, when drug processors and distributors turned coca and marijuana leaves into their own kind of gold.

This account of gold and one perfectly insane mountain just might have started a geologically recent 7 million years ago, when the Andean land mass and its mineral deposits began to bubble and boil. But who but a scientist wants to go back that far in time?

Jeffrey W. Brooks, Ph.D. geologist, tells me the lore of El Marmato as we drive out of wonderful Medellin, where once I taught English as a young man to the city's proud and dignified Antioqueños. Señor Jeff as he is known among the young geos working with him on the mountain, says EL Marmato's baggage includes the reality and myth of Señor Pablo. How the late Mr. Escobar of the Medellin Cartel once used El Marmato's barracks, half hidden beneath magnolia, Colombian pine and hibiscus, as both hiding place and meet-and-greet point for the campesinos who would come to pay their respects.

"That he came in by helicopter to play Godfather and shovel out the cash, the urban myth goes," says Brooks.

Jeff Brooks seems a considerate man. The 54-year-old American prefers to call the wildcat miners and millers scraping the mountain, the parched and sinewy Colombians heaving thick canvas sacks of rock from their shallow alluvial mines, Señor Jeff prefers the term "artisan" miners and millers to the more widely used banditos, or poachers. Or ladrones. Or even vaqueros -- buckaroos.

Brooks's nature resembles more than a few of the geologists I have met at mining sites over the years. He is friendly. Gregarious even. Casual. Possessing an easy way with his in-country comrades who report to him as senior geologist.

Still, after about a year watching events unfold on this mountain that stands some 2,000 meters in altitude, even someone as low key as this geologist, the gringo with the mustache who has worked for large Canadian mining companies his entire life, up until now, that is, Brooks lets slip a bit of his irritation.

Now that Señor Jeff is in charge of a team of 30 at a craggy outpost of some 800 very poor people, on a mountain three hours away from one of Latin America's most attractive and productive cities, he would like to see a few things besides geology click into place.

The camp chef, he says, might think about buying more local produce instead of trucking it in from Medellin. The kitchen staff, after making the lunchtime ensalada for the crew at 9 in the morning, really should refrigerate the salad until they serve it, he says. The young geos and a line-up inside the company barracks of a half-dozen 20-somethings mapping data points on computer screens "absolutely crave mentoring."

Yet this geologist, like most looking for world-class mineral deposits, does not even have time to map out surrounding parcels on his company's 5-by-15 kilometer patch of Marmato and the village of Enchandia, let alone act as teacher to a band of 30 or so young folk. Brooks is still scrambling on deadline, a badass corporate deadline, to render a clean database that then can merge with an existing database of drill holes and high-content mineral zones of Marmato and four adjacent properties.

He and his predecessors have drilled 27 holes into 8,000 meters of depth. His masters, his bosses, are probably muy smart. One is a geophysicist based in Medellin but hailing from, where else, Canada. Another, in charge of exploration, is based in Panama City, an up and coming city and meeting place du jour for deal makers with a foot in Latin America.

The company Brooks works for, Colombia Goldfields Ltd., is based in Toronto, with executives who have ties to properties in Nicaragua and elsewhere. Colombia Goldfields *, a public company, is at the mercy of shareholders and Geneva boutique banks when it comes to raising money for its diamond-bit drills, its salaries, its heavy equipment and the maintenance of the 30 employees living on the mountain.

Pretty soon, if what appears to be happening at El Marmato is real and not some logistic or political delirium, there will be a land grab, a scrum by even more peasants and silk-suited executives seeking their piece of these potently mineralized slopes and caves. And Colombia Goldfields will have to raise even more money, a lot more money, for mergers and property rights and relocations and mapping. For decent local fruit that is ripe but not rotten and ridden with worm carcasses, like some of the stuff from the Medellin produce wholesalers.

To raise that money efficiently, the company's execs need a share price that is high enough to keep current shareholders satisfied. Because if the stock's price is not high enough, those current shareholders will get diluted. Leached out like the rocks and dirt the mills around here process with cyanide solution. And then, they'll get MUY pissed off.

"There's real pressure here," he says, leading me and my photographer out the barracks door and onto what will become an impressive tour of Marmato. One of the first stops is what used to be the town square. To hear Brooks and his assistant, Santiago Jose Correa Ocambo, tell the story is to shudder and shake.

For decades, wildcat miners - the artisans -- have been running their own water sluices across the mountain. The disseminated mineral content of the mountain is high, and the gold dust seems sprinkled across the rocks and boulders. (Later visits to one of the independent mills (photo above), where the wildcatters take their rocks and dust to be crushed, sifted and separated with cyanide and other chemicals, confirmed for me that scores, if not hundreds, of families, have been feeding off the gold of this mountain for a long time.)

The water-flows across the mountain, which has the Rio Cauca running nearby, are degrading much of its structural integrity. "One night, I'm in bed," says Brooks, "and I hear what sounds like a sonic boom. Loud. Explosive. And then nothing." As it has done several times in the past three years, the steepest part of the mountain had let loose in a landslide. This one buried the town square, destroying City Hall and the Village Hospital in the process.

It's a wonder no one died in that slide. Or perhaps someone did and remains buried beneath the rubble. As far as the folks on the mountain know, everyone is still accounted for, even the banditos hauling their canvas sacks full of rock to the mills each day. Mongrels, as Sir Elton and Bernie Taupin phrase it, who ain't got a penny/sniffing for tidbits.

We stand now in the town square, buried by boulders and dirt not six months after the most recent major landslide. (This was just last week, my return to Colombia.) A lone donkey stands on one side of an adobe wall, pooping onto the chalky stone.

Oh yeh, and like some bats out of hell, there again are the "artisan" miners above us, splashing and running and funneling their water across and into the mountain, looking for their piece of the rock on this yellow-brick and manure road. Even as beneath them, there are people, their people, their paisan, living in homes, lean-tos, shacks. There are fellow Colombians working in the mills around them. Relatives. Cousins and cousins of cousins for sure. Even the company barracks with the cute little pool and the camp chef and the ping-pong tables that serve double duty as mapping desks, even that building is filled with their countrymen and countrywomen.

Except for senior geo Brooks, who hails from Pullman, Wash.

"The idiots," says Brooks. "They set up their sluice boxes, and they must be making money 'cause they keep coming back. But the landslides are weakening the road and burying their own homes. And they're still loading and dumping."

The largest legal owner of property in the state, or department, of Caldas, Colombia, is a so-called legacy company, an empresa that is domiciled in the country. Brooks estimates the legal haul from the mountain alone, Marmato that is, is about 25,000 ounces of gold a year, most of it from the mountain's lower half.

But oy, this is one beautiful piece of land here in western Colombia. Sitting near the equator, sprayed by sunshine and temperate climate and lots of water from the clouds, this mountain, in fact, most of Colombia, is a gardener's paradise. The first day I got here, I ate 14 separate fruits ... just for breakfast. The usual suspects and more: papaya, mango, starfruit, passion fruit, banana, melons, tomato (a fruit), kiwi, coffee beans and on and on. Es verdad, volditos mios.

The shade of a non-native eucalyptus, or a very native Colombian pine tree, or a magnolia, removes the sting from the sun's rays. And the orchids, they're everywhere.

So besides the water pressure in the company showers and the regular landslides that one day will kill people, aside from the kids working for a barely living wage and the mountain's registry of local poachers who swear by Dio that the mountain and its abundance of mineral belong to them by birthright, what other challenges could a middle-aged, toiling geologist who doctored in porphyrys possibly face in paradise?

"I've always worked for big companies, Barrack, Echo Bay, others," Brooks says," and I always have wanted to work for something small in search of something big. I think I have it; history, all of this rock and soil tell me I have it, something potentially world class in the way of a deposit, multiple deposits even at our surrounding sites."

What's to worry then? As the natives say, tranquillo, yes? "I guess you could say that, 'to relax,' but you get to leave here," Brooks says, not unkindly. "I am here, in 6 weeks and out 2, or in 8 and out 3. But we are under pressure. Local government requires convincing that this mountain requires serious attention if the roads are to maintain their structural integrity. There are relocation issues for the people who live here. The kitchen and the camp need better fruit. Local fruit. God knows these kids here need mentoring. I need a clean database. Our executives are ambitious. Gold is almost $1,000 an ounce, and they want numbers, resource numbers, mineralization numbers for a press release."

On top of all this, Brooks is concerned that one of the many labs cross-checking his assays and examining the gold content of his rock chips, a lab in the USA, somehow appears to have messed up a Quality Assurance Quality Control report, which is necessary if the company is to file its required Canadian 43-101 resource estimate for the mountain. The QAQC statement is delayed because of the lab snafu.

A quantifiable number of mineralized grade and size -- How much gold is in the mountan, hombres, and how easy is it to open-pit mine or drill out or both? -- a big number is what the financiers in Toronto and London and Switzerland and Vancouver need if they are to raise more dinero without watering down the stock price. Sadly, the delay in filing a 43-101 resource estimate is coinciding with a viscious drop in the stock prices of all junor exploration companies such as Colombia Goldfields.

Entonces, low stock price leads to less money for the company when it returns to the capital market for cash. That leads to lots more shares to raise that money, which leads to muy pissed-off current shareholders. Few execs, whether they run gold miners or semiconductor factories, want to mess with the good will they share with shareholders.

Brooks stops on this quite steep dirt path on the side of this mountain, halfway to heaven and halfway to hell (OK, so I like images attached to the word-flow once in a while ... but it all seems so true). We are both sweating like pigs, or is it donkeys that sweat like pigs? So is my photographer (and amigo), Jim Marx.

"Look, we have five active projects going here, we have nine core drill son site and another four or five on the way. We have very active rock chip sampling. This mountain and its property rights are sliced like a cake, a lower zone and an upper zone. If you have rights, and we've been buying them up as fast as we can, you can go lateral into the mountain hundreds of meters, but someone else owns the vertical rights above you and below you; first time I've ever seen that."

Next: Part III -- Alluvial dreams/hard rock facts en El Marmato

All photos but one by Jim Marx; Jeffrey W. Brooks profile snapped by Thom Calandra.
-- Thom Calandra is of service at ThomCalandra.com.


* Thom and his family own $45,000 worth of Colombia Goldfields shares at current prices. The Toronto company's stock trades in Canada, Germany and on Nasdaq in the USA. Thom and family have no intention of buying or selling any current or additional shares of the company until at least three months after this series on El Marmato is completed. Thom paid about $60,000 for the shares several months ago. He and his photograher have received no fee or compensation from Colombia Goldfields, unless you count some empanadas, some platanos and frijoles and three-hour jeep rides into the countryside.

EL MARMATO, Colombia: Going Underground PART I

By Thom Calandra
(ThomCalandra.com)

MEDELLIN, Colombia (TC) -- The words are music to my ears, from the geologist who would take me and my photographer to a pock-marked mountain some three hours' jeep jaunt from this world-class city of orchids and emeralds. The words are: "When we get there, do you want to go underground?"

I was in Antioquia, fresh from Miami, for the first time in more than 20 years. I was back in Colombia, where I taught English as a lad. I was back in Medellin for a reason: to see a patchwork of gold mines in EL Marmato, a stunning countryside decked with the fincas of the rich and the shacks of the poor.

I was headed underground, 2,000-plus meters high. What I learned this week stirred me.

Good morning, volditos mios! Over the next several weeks, I will be reporting as best I can what I saw on the mountain. And what I saw in the city. I think the images will help all of us see why Colombia, and the equatorial city of Medellin in particular, are ripe with charm and filled with beautiful people. Hard working folks. Some of the best platanos and mango and passion fruit that ever have passed through my lips. Terrific gorgonzola pizza, too, at 1969 Pizza in the luscious El Poblado neighborhood, plus blood-drenched tripe, chorizo and frijoles (over easy on zee lard, por favor), plumed wth streaks of Latino sour cream to die for.

Above all else, I was there to see how this poor country, fabulously rich in coal, emeralds, coffee beans and flowers, will deja-vu itself, transform back into the South American nation that once produced more gold than any other. More oro, that is, before the violence and the politics and the shadow of narcotics distributors allowed other countries, Argentina and Peru and Chile, to post yearly gold totals that leave Colombia in the dust.

As my voldy morts know, I was in Medellin and Andean points beyond to don the rubber boots and tramp in the mud and donkey poop, to rest my trekking rump for a moment on a vat or two of cyanide and see whether I was loco to have purchased a stock position ($45,000 USA or so at current Nasdaq prices; in my haste, I paid $65,000 for the shares several months ago) in the Canadian company that controls a Medellin subsidiary that is drilling holes into EL Marmato.

And yes, mis amigos y amigas, this junior explorer, like nearly all of the Canadian variety, hopes to launch numerized, mineralized, magnified press releases into orbit above its piece of the Colombian rock.

I hope you join me as I recover from voldy moldy jet lag and assemble the words and images of a region, and one mountain especially: El Marmato. The story, like Medellin's El Tiene Todo billboards, has it all. We have the wildcat campesino mills and the landslides. We see the river literally, Rio Cauca, the country's second in size, and figuratively in the torrents of brown sweat pouring from legal and illegal underground and above ground scavengers and miners, heaving potato sacks of stone to their chosen mill for pay day. Most of us can imagine the hopes and material dreams of the poorest paisans in this story, some having worked so long heaving and chipping and sifting stone, their backs are bent and their hands as spikey as a native Colombian pine tree.

Oh yeh, hombres ... and it goes with saying, in this story we sense, can almost smell in the mineralized dust at our feet the lust of silk suited executives several nations removed. This story of mine includes the harried geologist, a PhD. from America, who is building a team of young geos, and who s looking, he says, to mentor and improve the lives of 900 or so Colombians who live at EL Marmato.

Our story has sluices and huecos and especially, voldy morts, the lure of gold.

I think we'll see -- I know I have -- what it might take to rachet a promising string of properties in these Andes into a resource of millions, and perhaps tens of millions of ounces of gold. The almost impossible odds. The ridiculous hurdles thrown up by trade pacts and rocky one-lane roads, bureaucrats and public perception.

That's it for Part I, friends. Please refrain from any selling or buying regarding this project until you have viewed all of the pieces of the mountain, so to speak, all of the parts of this report to come ... and the images shot by my photographer and friend, Jim Marx. (And maybe one or two bodice-rippers by yours truly.*)

Finalmente, as a matter of disclosure, allow me to say I will not be buying or selling any more shares in the company whose rather grand and entirely true story will follow. Not even if my existing shares triple or quadruple in value. Which is entirely possible, given the scope of the Colombian project under way and the talent and experience level of the geology and executive team. At the same time, I won't be selling the shares, or buying any more, if the opposite happens: if the mine and related Colombian properties are as washed out as the wildcat landslides that already have wiped out the village's City Hall and Hospital.

Voldy morts have my word that any liquefying sale of my (and my family's) $45,000 worth of shares, which we paid for entirely, or additional purchases for this oro loco mio, will not happen at least for three months after this multi-part series on EL Marmato is completed.

Entonces ...

Later, mios volditos. 'Sta luego.

-- Thom Calandra in Medellin (and back to Tiburon prontissimo)

* Photos by Jim Marx, except where noted