Leaving work this evening I saw an animal run across the road in the distance. Nearing the main highway, I saw that there was not one but two animals and that they were a pair of pronghorn antelope. They did not seem the least bit concerned about me stopping.
The hill in the background is obviously man-made and is called a dedicated leach pad. The black lines running up the sides are plastic pipes that carry water with a very weak cyanide solution (think Rasputin) that is drip irrigated onto the surface of the pad. As the water percolates through the piles of ore, the gold in the rocks bonds with the cyanide. The black roll around the bottom of the hill is the edge of a liner that captures the water so that it can be pumped to the ore processing facility in order to extract the gold using activated carbon and electrolysis.
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