Original subtitles

And that's $3 million right there on the table.

Parker schnabel is searching for his next big score.

- This is wild. - Yeah.

Deep in the jungles of Brazil.

There's a huge amount of conflict over mining.

The only way to understand is to come here and see it.

That is cool.

And if there's an opportunity for us to invest,

then I want to look at those opportunities.

- Look, look, that's gold. - -Look at these bad boys.

I did get fitted for a bulletproof vest, though.

That's a first.

Previously on Parker's trail.

Billions of dollars worth of gold got found by hand.

That's the serra pelada pit.

The lake that's there now makes underground mining

or open pit mining very difficult.

This is the geologist.

Two or three million ounces came out of this hole in the '80s.

I'm sure that there's at least half that in the tailings.

It kind of shifts my focus because the tailings

are all stacked nice, neatly in a pile.

In all the years that we've done these trips,

this is probably the opportunity that interests me the most.

I never actually got a chance to actually walk around

where the tailings are and just kind of get a feel

for what's there.

On his quest to find serra pelada gold

I wish I knew what this place looked like before

all this stuff was stacked here.

Parker's got a new lead.

The four million tons of tailings left over from the original 1980s gold rush.

I'm just going to go look at what that black stuff is.

They might not want to follow me.

Nobody might want to follow me.

Between 1979 and 1992, miners extracted

the gold-rich hard rock known as ore from the pit

and brought it to the surface where it was broken apart

by hand to release the larger gold nuggets.

But Parker believes a significant amount of fine gold

was left behind in the waste piles known as tailings.

Every night since I've gotten here,

I've gotten to bed thinking they found something like

2.6 million ounces in that hole.

What's still left in the tailings?

I need to figure out an answer to that question.

If that hill dropped off at the level or lower

than that water, that's a mountain of material.

I would imagine the town's built on some of them.

What was their recovery rate back in the day?

Nobody's ever had a proper recovery system in here.

True.

I'm making one really big assumption in all of this.

Their recovery rate was.

I don't know if that's true or not.

The money that would have to go into it, probably $200 million.

Revenue that would come out of it would probably be like 800,000 ounces.

One and a half billion dollars, revenue-wise.

So it's a huge project and it would be fun.

Like... I'd enjoy that.

Am I gonna set up in Brazil and live here

for the next 20 years?

I guess I'd probably have to.

The other nice thing about it is

the exploration techniques that we use in the Yukon

are exactly what you'd use here,

except for the analysis side.

Instead of running them through a sluice box, you send them to a lab.

To test their worth, Parker needs to collect samples

from the tailings and send them to a lab

where they can be crushed and analyzed to determine

their true gold content.

It's hard to pan in there.

I should go somewhere where the water's not so rushing.

For now, all he's got is a basic gold pan.

Turn it to me some.

What?

- That's gold. - Yeah.

That's incredible.

Well, that's a good start.

- Any luck? - Yeah, actually a pretty decent pan.

The next step is to figure out what's there.

Before Parker can do anything more than a pan,

he needs to approach the landowners.

I have this document. It has all the official logs

for the mining brief in the cooperative.

Let's go.

After 13 years of mining, the serra pelada pit

was shut down by the government in 1992

over safety concerns.

40,000 miners from the original rush

then formed a cooperative and acquired mining rights to the land.

I think you should be careful because we really don't know

the people, really don't know the power dynamics here.

Right. If it were simple, it would have been mined by now.

Yeah, no, it's very interesting.

You know, with the cooperative,

we just need to go talk to them.

How do you think they're going to behave, Parker?

This meeting is gonna be a little difficult because

there's a lot of emotion and history tied up here.

I'm not sure what approach to take.

I think the best way to do it is just to be super simple.

We should say, okay, we would like to take some samples

of the tailings and take them to a lab.

I'll be curious to see what they say to that.

It would be an amazing project.

That desire can't be a part of the decision-making process, though.

If you're in a negotiation and you're not willing to walk away,

you're screwed.

Well, this is it, I guess.

They're all directors.

Parker.

He wants us to go inside so then we can talk there.

Local miner Leonidas de Oliveira

is one of the directors representing the interests

of the co-op, making sure all 40,000 members

get a good deal out of any business arrangement.

He wants to understand why we're having this meeting.

What do you want here, actually?

Serra pelada has such a rich part of the history here,

and we've traveled all over the world

and been to a lot of areas, and we really try

to understand what's going on in those areas, and, you know,

from a gold miner's perspective.

They already have some assessment that says

it would be worth five trillion dollars.

Like he is asking again the specific interest.

Suddenly it feels like I'm getting put on the spot.

One part of it that really interests me,

probably interests me the most,

is the tailings from the old pit.

In the next few days, we could take

a couple hundred samples and get them sent to a lab and tested.

And it starts to build a bit of a model of like what's there.

It's obvious that there's still a lot of opportunity here,

but a company is only going to pay for what you can prove is there.

A company that's buying them is gonna be very biased

- to say the value is low, right? - Yeah.

Nobody's done anything about what might be in the tailings.

And right now, the value assigned to it is zero.

Yeah.

Because there's no report done on it.

And that's what a company would pay a lot of money for.

I really think an impartial group studying it

on their behalf and trying to sell it for the best price possible

is going to maximize returns for them.

We would take a cut of the sale price.

So we want the purchase price to be as big as possible.

By proving the gold value of the tailings,

Parker believes he can increase the co-op sale price

in exchange for a cut of the profits.

That could reach hundreds of millions of dollars

without having to mine the tailings himself.

Let's make it real simple.

If it does hit, you're the first one in the door

in helping develop what could be

a hugely profitable project.

And I can live very comfortably for the rest of my life, right?

- Perfect. Okay. - Okay.

It would be an amazing project.

There's a lot of things going for it.

I'd love to get involved, but that's in the gray area.

It's not black and white.

Mega exciting.

They haven't heard something like that before.

It's what they need, though. Honestly,

it'll 5x what they get out of it.

They were not used to talk about the tailings.

What Parker is proposing is like, let's start from zero.

Let's do the mineral research as it should be done.

Let's put a price, a correct price,

and then let's go from there.

This is the right way of doing a project.

How many times do we see an opportunity like this?

This is really something that I truly hope that Parker can move forward with.

I do think you've got a lot of quite high-up dudes

there all feeling very positive.

I just, it's the biggest problem

is when you don't have, you know, what did we have,

four out of seven of the directors?

I guess what I'm getting at is, like, we didn't have enough for a decision.

I'm very curious to see what happens.

So am I. This is like dynamite.

The lady here, Donna Maria, is she the loveliest lady

- that you've ever met? - Bom dia.

Morning, Donna Maria.

In the gold town of serra pelada,

Parker's on a mission to find out

if a multi-billion dollar payday sits in the waste piles

from the original 1980s rush.

Do you want to have some coffee?

But until he gets the go-ahead from the cooperative

that owns the mining rights, he can't test for gold.

Right now, we're just kind of waiting for the co-op to make

a decision on whether we can sample the gold tailings.

There could be billions of dollars of gold still in the ground.

You know, it's a huge project.

What's the plan for the day,

while the cooperative are having to think about whether or not

we can actually do any of that stuff?

I think we should first just speak with the lab.

Do you have the number?

- This morning? - Yes, I can call them.

So, I mean, we know exactly what they could provide us,

like the time of the analysis and all that.

Cool.

What was the name of the guy we met last night?

Jonas.

- Jonas. - Jonas.

- Yeah, Jonas. - Jonas.

He wanted to take us prospecting, I think?

Yeah, I think we wanted to go prospecting.

It's a different area.

I don't know how far away from here it is,

but I think it would be interesting to prospect earlier.

So we could split up and you and I could go with him.

- We can do the prospecting. - I'm jealous.

You guys are off prospecting. I always like prospecting.

It's exciting.

You need to go absolutely mental if you see

a little bit of gold in the pan, all right?

I'll try.

Go full Danny.

I mean, never go full Danny.

I can't. I don't have the energy for that.

Plenty to do. Awesome.

Nice one. Obrigado. Tchau.

Tchau. Obrigada.

Danny and Larissa stay behind to wait for a call from the co-op

and line up a lab to test any tailing samples,

while Parker and Diego head three and a half miles north

to prospect in the wilderness surrounding serra pelada.

It's hard for me to believe that there's this rich of a hard rock deposit

and not some really good placer around it.

Seven years of doing these trips,

this is by far the richest place that we've ever been.

I think that it's about time to go do some prospecting.

I met this guy, Jonas, and he said he knows some areas here.

So we're going to go get the rust off

the old gold pan there.

Okay, let's go. Tá bom.

With so much attention directed at the huge serra pelada pit,

Jonas is one of just a few miners looking for gold

in the region's waterways,

where there could be huge untapped placer deposits.

Wow.

He has always been involved in mining because of his family.

Right.

Over millions of years, hard rock gold

from the serra pelada vein erodes into ancient rivers and streams.

This heavy gold settles as slow-moving currents

deposit it on the riverbed.

Over many years, Jonas has decoded the land

to track down these pockets of placer gold.

That's awesome. Good job.

80 grams is worth over $5,000 and could be an indicator

of even bigger deposits beneath the surface.

Otherwise, we have to walk 10k.

Yeah?

Yeah, yeah.

It's a long way down there.

Jonas believes the strength of the falls forces gold deposits

into the pool below, known by miners as a glory hole.

But first, they have to get down there.

- We need to rappel. - Do you have any rope?

Yeah.

Yeah, let's build a system and let's get down there.

I'm positive when I say that you can only be

as much prepared as you can actually be.

Like, we brought all the equipment.

We will just need to be prepared to face whatever

challenge pops up in front of us.

What if your rope's not long enough?

Like 30 meters.

That is more than 30 meters.

- You think so? - Yeah. 35.

One way to find out.

Okay, you ready?

Rocks are slippery.

What the did I do for this job?

That was a little sketchy.

Probably not.

I hope there's gold in here because we did something

really crazy right now.

Let's go find some gold.

- I'm gonna try one down here. - Yeah.

No.

It's just bedrock and boulders.

Jonas believes the force of recent flash floods

has washed the heavy sediment and gold further downstream.

- That makes sense. - Yeah.

In town

Larissa has received a call from the co-op.

The guy from the cooperative gave me a call.

- They have a decision? - He wouldn't tell me.

Told if it was possible for us to go there

tomorrow morning so we can have a second talk.

Did he sound happy?

I don't know. When we talk with the cooperative,

it's always hard to tell what they're really thinking.

But we just have to wait for Parker to return.

That's good material.

It's good material, different material than usual.

A quarter mile downstream from the waterfall

I have to ask him to teach you how to pan.

I can't use one of those things.

I mean, I can, but I'm not very good.

Parker, Jonas and Diego have found a spot

with good signifiers of gold.

Yeah. Well, that's pretty good.

Yeah, it's kind of interesting that there's not a lot of,

like, placer mining going on.

It sounds like there's never been any super large-scale placer mining.

And I think these areas have a lot of untapped potential.

I found some gold.

This is cool. My first successful pan.

Am I a gold miner now?

You're hooked.

Right now, the decision on whether we can sample

the old tailings, you know, that's like my main focus here.

What?

It doesn't even fit in the hole.

- You guys are working hard. - Absolutely not.

Diego threw me off a waterfall.

- Control descent. - You abseiled down a waterfall.

Wicked.

We called the lab, talked to the guy a little bit

about the methodology and about that,

so I have the notes here I can send to you.

We still don't have the authorization from the cooperative,

but they called us and they want to meet tomorrow.

Tomorrow morning, we speak to the cooperative

and find out what their decision is.

I'm so curious about these tailings.

I really just want to get something going with the co-op.

Hopefully, we'll get some answers soon.

- Probably... - behind the back?

- Like that? Like this? - Yeah.

Yeah.

Bom dia.

In the gold rush town of serra pelada, Brazil.

I get that they have to, like, consult a board,

but it's not a complicated thing we're asking for.

It's a free, you know, set of results for your guys' property, right?

I've kind of gotten a little bit obsessed.

If they say yes and the results are good,

we'll go from like 0.5% on the progress bar

to like 1%.

It's a big jump, that's a double.

But I have no idea what's gonna happen in the room.

Parker is about to find out if he has the green light

from the local mining co-op...

Bom dia.

To test for a potential $2 billion payday.

He's saying, as two of the directors are not here,

they still haven't agreed for us to take the samples

from the tailings or for anywhere else.

We're just a bit pressed for time.

I was really hoping to be able to do this today.

I really do wanna try to make something happen,

but when you're in a corner and feel like you have to have something,

or actually have to have something,

you better hope nobody else knows it.

What if we sent the samples in to the lab

under the cooperative's name?

And we're really just not really involved other than

in just collecting them?

The issue then is, will they share the results with us?

Yes.

- He's saying we can go now. - Okay.

They will be willing to go with us.

Okay, sweet.

- Really exciting. - It's never simple, is it?

Smart, though. Well done.

We are going to go together with the cooperative

in the mining site.

We are going to take some of the tailings, send to the lab under their name.

We are paying for them and helping them out,

so that's why they agreed to it.

The people that aren't in the room was my big concern.

If everybody had been in the room,

it probably would have been fine.

We're taking a bit of a risk here in that

we don't get access to the results now,

'cause it won't be our name on the paperwork

with the lab, but a risk worth taking.

I just want to see what's in some rocks.

But I wasn't too stoked on taking no for an answer,

so hopefully this works.

With the go-ahead to test the tailings,

Parker is back in one of the only working pieces

of equipment in serra pelada...

You love a backhoe.

A rented backhoe.

Diego.

Parker.

- We're out of fuel. - - It's blinking on empty.

We need to go to a gas station.

Do you know where there's a gas station in town?

If you go straight, there is a gas station there.

Imagine if you're a gold rush fan in this town and you just see Parker schnabel

driving down your high street.

Yeah, running to your gas station.

- Yeah. - Like, "hi."

Here it comes, the big guns.

- Are you sure? - Yeah.

What's happening?

No?

Try it again.

- Should try it again. - You run out of cash, Parker?

No.

My credit card doesn't get declined almost anywhere.

See?

She wants to take a picture.

What we said in the car happened.

- Obrigado. - Obrigado.

Obrigada. Tchau.

Fueled up, Parker and the team head to the tailings piles

to meet the co-op members.

Yeah.

Nice. No, this is exactly what we're looking for.

Is all of that tailings?

Yeah.

Sweet. Yeah, no, this is perfect.

My plan right now would be to dig, like,

three or four holes from where the backhoe is that way,

testing depth, and then take a bunch of the other samples

from these walls and some of the rocks down there and whatnot.

That's good?

Parker is searching for rocks containing gold, known as ore.

But across the 4 million tons of tailings

from the serra pelada pit are unprocessed rocks

that could be rich with gold nuggets,

as well as rocks that have already been broken apart

and the nuggets removed, but might still hold fine gold.

To find where the gold concentration is highest,

Parker will dig in 10 different areas,

collecting 10 samples from each hole,

meticulously labeling the depth and location

of each one.

This looks like a rock full of ore.

- Yeah. - I want a piece of that rock,

but not the whole thing.

I'm going to throw it down..

He's got a very different way of behaving

when he's in kind of mine boss mode

to when he's doing Parker's trail.

Just Chuck it down right here.

He quite likes keeping his cards a little bit close to his chest.

You know, that's just how he works.

But, I mean, you can see he's very excited

by the whole kind of prospecting.

I don't know anything about geology.

It never seems to have been of use.

I wish now I would have taken some of the geology stuff

a little bit more seriously, but is there gold in it

or is there not gold in it? Can you get a deal done

or can you not get a deal done?

That's all that really matters.

Don't go crazy.

No.

Is he... is he okay?

Hard rock.

There we go.

Put this in your bag.

- Having fun? - Yeah.

Look at this rock.

- Isn't that like the coolest rock ever? - -Wow.

In the waste piles of Brazil's $5.7 billion 1980s gold rush...

Has it got gold in it?

I bet there's gold in that rock.

Parker may be on the verge of his biggest ever

- investment opportunity. - You reckon?

If the 1980s miners left unprocessed gold in their tailings,

Parker could be standing on nearly $2 billion

of undiscovered gold.

- How can there not be? Look at it. - Pretty excited, aren't you?

That rock makes me excited.

Now he's collecting samples to send to a lab

to find out if his theory is right.

What I'll do is I'll just take a scoop of dirt out of a bucket.

- You'll just shovel into this bag. - Okay.

You just look pretty and do your thing.

- Yeah. - And then each scoop,

you'll just label five, six, seven, eight.

And then I should probably fill the hole back in.

Okay.

Parker's plan is to bag up 100 samples containing dirt

and rocks discarded from the old pit,

all of which could still contain quantities of fine gold.

Hole number one.

Each scoop of dirt represents a new layer of tailings piled here

during the 13-year-long gold rush.

Each sample we're trying to be deeper and deeper and deeper.

Ooh, that's a good one.

It seems hard for me to believe that there wouldn't be at least 30% losses

or something when they were mining in the '80s.

Doesn't help that I'm, like, bad on the controls.

Sorry.

While Parker digs, Dani catches up with the co-op members.

You think it was a comet from outer space?

That's a bag from 1980.

- Looks like... - Yeah, cool.

We're definitely in the right place.

Don't be afraid to take four big scoops out

from the top first and just throw them

on the ground here and get one from

in the middle too, you know what I mean?

That's as deep as that hole's going to get.

I know pretty much everything about mineral research.

Another thing is like to be part of it.

And now I'm part of it.

And this is the moment of truth for us to know

if there is some potential in the tailings or not.

So we are very excited.

That's enough.

Okay, back number seven.

First hole complete, Parker moves on in search of coarser,

potentially richer material.

What I'm trying to figure out, did, like, everything have gold in it?

And get, like, kind of a broad idea of what's going on.

And the only way to do that is to get a,

you know, a profile.

I think we're going in there.

- No. - The next one we do will be behind

this tree down there, which is a lot easier to get into.

There's big rocks in it.

Take some of them every now and then, too.

- In the same bag? - Yeah, like, take that.

So were they, like, hand-picking out stuff to crush

and doing it by, like, visual?

Because, like, why would there be big rock

mixed in with the material that they've crushed?

Parker's theory is that the bigger rocks

are from the early days of serra pelada,

when large gold nuggets were easily broken away from the veins.

If he's right...

The fine gold inside the leftover rocks

could still be worth a fortune.

If it's going to be super rocky,

- we could just grab some rocks. - Yeah?

Yeah.

Someone is happy.

Of all the places I've ever been in the world in the last decade,

this is probably the most interesting prospect I've ever seen.

It would baffle me if there's not a project here.

This will be the last one.

- It's just I can't keep it from caving in. - Okay.

As Parker fills in his second test hole... Yeah.

He receives a call from the film crew.

What?

Some guys just showed up to the hotel.

They've said that the guys we've been working with

don't have any right to this ground.

They're saying that the guys that we've been meeting with, like,

from the co-op, aren't legit.

Yeah.

If Parker doesn't have permission from the rightful owners to test this ground...

So I think, before we do anything, we need to go talk to them.

It throws the entire tailings project into question.

All right.

We can go back and talk to them.

This will be interesting.

- We'll get everybody ready. - All right.

How much water have we got? Let's have a look.

Danny is putting his engineering skills to the test.

500 milliliters weighs 1.1 pounds.

The sample bags for the lab must not exceed 10 pounds.

So we need nine of these. That's 10 pounds.

Danny's plan is to bush fix together a balance

to weigh the bags.

We have a bowling knot, 10 pounds.

The pulley, which is going to go there.

Cool.

So the second that lifts off the ground,

you've got 10 pounds.

The magic moment.

Perfect.

Means all these samples are going to be pretty much

around 10 pounds.

- They look official. - Yeah, they do.

Is that them down there?

On the outskirts of serra pelada...

Do you guys know what's going on?

You heard anything?

They'll go on camera?

Parker has been called away from his testing project

to attend an urgent meeting with another group

who claim to be the official representatives

of the serra pelada mining cooperative.

Is there somewhere we can go to talk?

There's a room we can use here, I think.

- Yeah, we can go in the room. - Yeah.

Seven or eight guys have turned up claiming that they're the real directors

of the cooperative, which creates a lot of complications.

A for Parker's proposal and b for our filming legalities.

So, we're listening. We have these, we can hear their mics, so...

Do you want to start, or.

I don't know what's going on.

He's managing the cooperative right now,

and he heard that we were here,

we were talking with the cooperative.

Currently, the board of directors

are formed by seven directors.

Four of them are here.

The majority of the board is here with us.

When we showed up in serra pelada,

Leonidas said exactly that, that there was only

partial representation in the room

when we were meeting them. He was very clear about that.

Yeah.

He said that he was going to contact,

I'm guessing it was these gentlemen and lady.

Did that happen?

He told us, yes, that Leonidas contacted him,

but Mr. Leonidas was referring to other directors.

Then I said, this is confusing.

One president plus six directors of the management board.

Group representative sandro is claiming

there are two factions within the co-op's management

and that they are currently in dispute.

There is a lot of still legal issues

surrounding the cooperative.

The work that we're doing here could bring troubles

for the cooperative and for us.

Long story short, they believe the ones

we were talking before were not entitled to be directors.

Until all legal arguments are settled,

no one has permission to Grant mining rights

to a third party.

Yeah, that's too bad.

Most of the people here, they're old guys.

I mean, they're in the 60s, 70s, 80s.

So what they're trying to do here is to fight

for the rights and to see one day the mining operating again.

All their internal issues have to get dealt with

before anybody can do a deal with them, right?

He 100% agrees with you, because, like,

one thing leads to the other and to the other.

Yeah.

Okay.

All right. Well, thank you guys for your time.

I feel a bit let down because we invested a lot

of our time, we invested money.

Now Parker is very curious about the potential

and is very keen to develop a project,

but I think we should be really careful.

We don't know the people who were talking before,

we don't know the people that showed up today,

so who can we trust?

I don't know what I think.

Those are all just unnecessary complications.

There's obviously so much that's happened

in the background of this,

and there's so much between the lines

that we've been told that I'm sure we could sit in there

for two days and get told the story of the cooperative

and still not have, you know, the whole picture, right?

It kind of baffles me.

I'm just wondering what happens in 10 minutes time

when we have another 10 people banging on the door

and saying that they're the new cooperative.

It's possible.

With this, like, I'm looking at them all now like,

"are you lying? I don't believe you."

I need a beer.

Yeah, I don't really feel like hanging around here

while the two factions of the co-op do battle.

I don't know that anybody can save that outfit.

So I think it's time we pack up and move out.

- Next time on Parker's trail. - It's very wild.

We're very much in the middle of nowhere.

- What the is that? - A Jaguar.

That is awesome.

It'll be cool to see a big hard rock mine.

Holy.

That's so cool.

I mean, I'd throw some money at a project with that dude.

Parker's in love.

He's literally falling for the hard rock industry.