The Mines of Mordor - Weskus Defiler
A special airborne operations team from Protect the West Coast (PTWC) has flown 1,500km of coastline on the West Coast to record the true extent of destruction wrought by illegal mining.
The PTWC team -- comprising CEO Mike Schlebach as logistics backup and an air crew of Cape Town gyrocopter legend Jean Tresfron and PTWC media guru Jacque Smit -- accomplished the mission over five flights that covered the distance in two days. Tresfon's AutoGyro MT-03 has a maximum flight time of 2h45m plus 45 minutes of legal reserve, so each flight needed to be less than 300km.
"The idea behind the project was for our organisation to capture video footage and images of the entire West coast from Lamberts Bay to the Alexander Bay with a special focus on all the mining operations taking place in the area," Schlebach said. "The content will be stored as a resource that can assist mining oversight specialists and scientists, various organisations, the media and ourselves, which is very important to our work in stopping illegal mining and preserving what is left of this amazing coast."
Armed with a Go Pro and his Canon 7D-MK2, Smit flew the mission with Tresfon, shooting video and stills, while Schlebach followed in a back up vehicle collecting fuel along the way.
"While we have not yet compiled all the footage, the trip was a great success and we are looking forward to sharing this much needed visual imagery with the world. A very big "Thank you" to Jean for his outstanding effort - we are incredibly grateful," Schlebach said.
Smit said that during the flights it was difficult to absorb the sheer extent of the destruction, made worse when interspersed with stretches of pristine coastline:
"In some places, the cliffs are cut away and you're faced with horrific scenes - a moonscape as far as the eye can see, like a bone-chilling scene from Mordor (the defiled, dead land JRR Tolkein describes in Lord of the Rings). The amount of destruction and lack of rehabilitation is heartbreaking."
"It was tough to digest the constantly changing terrain below us. At one point, we'd fly over the gargantuan Tormin mine that looks like a set out of the movie Blood Diamond, with huge chunks of earth gouged out and gigantic trucks driving around. It was an eye-popping thing.
"Then we'd be over maybe the longest stretch of unspoilt coast, a mere 100km of beautiful and pristine shoreline up to Hondeklip Baai."
Tormin is just one of many miners with concessions to plough through beaches to find sands rich in high-grade deposits of naturally occurring zircon, ilmenite, rutile, magnetite and garnet - all minerals used in every day products such as ceramics, digital printing, dentistry and electrical components.
Tresfon and Smit began the journey when they took off from home base Morningstar Flying Club, inland from Melkbosstrand near Cape Town, and landed at the airfield in Lamberts Bay. "The first leg took place in perfectly calm and blue skies, with not even a hint of fog," said Tresfon. However, that soon changed just past Strandfontein, just as the mining areas from De Punt hove into view.
A strong northeasterly berg wind, hot and turbulent, made for a bumpy ride that depleted their fuel reserves faster than they had hoped, "but we battled gamely along, alternating between areas of extreme natural wilderness and beauty, and areas of complete devastation, resembling a post apocalyptic battlefield. Abandoned and rusting tractors, gravel sorters and other assorted mining gear littered the coast".
"Massive craters and cofferdams, some filled with bright orange water, dotted the coastline with many at the site of old and abandoned mines. Clearly very little attempt, if any at all, is made at post mining rehabilitation. Eventually we arrived at Kleinzee Airfield, landing into the still blustery northeaster."
The last leg on Day 1 saw the team take off and head north to Alexander Bay, the Orange River and the Namibian border, passing over many kilometres of land mined by companies such as De Beers, most of which lies fallow, and totally unrehabilitated. What they saw was a scary correlation with the actual description of Mordor by Tolkien: "“Mists curled and smoked from dark and noisome pools. The reek of them hung stifling in the still air. Far away, now almost due south, the mountain-walls of Mordor loomed, like a black bar of rugged clouds floating above a dangerous fog-bound sea.”
"The wind did not let up and we bumped and thumped our way along the coast, with the mining and degradation of the seashore becoming worse as we headed north. Most of this coast is off limits and inaccessible to terrestrial travellers. The original plan was to fly a little way up the Orange River before returning to Kleinzee, but the wind had eroded our fuel reserves to the point where I did not feel comfortable and elected to head straight back," Tresfon said.
Day 2 again dawned with no fog, but the sky was dark grey and ominous with heavy rain falling out to sea. After refuelling and pre-flight checks were complete, Tresfon and Smit took off to the south, "initially getting hammered by the incessant berg winds before outrunning the frontal system and bursting out from under the clouds and into the sunshine about an hour later. We followed the coast back to Lamberts Bay, this time with the light behind us and collecting more footage along the way".
The team flew back to Morningstar beautiful calm conditions, following the coast to the Berg River mouth before heading inland to Vredenburg, Langebaan and back to the coast at Yzerfontein. "We landed back at Morningstar having flown 1,418km in just under 12 hours of flight time, with all our objectives achieved," Tresfon said.
PTWC plans to make a short film from the journey.
