“It’s just the mucker,” our Mongolian guide said. “Right now we’re 551 meters beneath the surface of the earth. Want to see the bottom?”

In a dimly light hole in the middle of nowhere Mongolian civil movement officers, members of the media and exploration shaft construction workers from Mongolia and Canada had a chat, 551 meters beneath the Gobi’s golden sands.

“So how do you dig down and take all the rock out,” an inquiring mind asked while looking at black rock hundreds of millions of years old.

A construction project like exploration shaft #1 at Ivanhoe Mines Ltd Oyu Tolgoi project has yet to be done in Mongolia, officials explained.

Copping and modifying a famous line from American TV, an Ivanhoe official said it was, “Going where no Mongolian has gone before.”

During a presentation in one of Ivanhoe’s “weather havens,” earlier in the morning, more than a few faces looked puzzled as terms like, “block-cave, water aquifer, exploration shaft and world’s largest undeveloped copper-gold project,” were discussed while near 3-dimensional geological maps and mining development plans flashed on a projection screen.

However, this was the entire reason why this group of of civil movement members, journalists and politicians had hopped on a charter flight in Ulaanbaatar at 6:30am, escaping snow flurries to fly to the Gobi.

After touring mining sites in the United States for two weeks on an educational tour, the group was ready to see what was going on in their own backyard, equipped with first hand knowledge of large exploration and mining projects.

“You know the Henderson mine you saw in Colorado? Oyu Tolgoi will be bigger than that, and Tavan Tolgoi will be bigger than Oyu Tolgoi,” Layton Croft, Executive Vice President of Corporate Affaris for Ivanhoe told group members as they recalled the huge underground complex they had seen in the US.

However group members said the most informational section was going down the exploration shaft for a hands-on tour. After getting geared up and climbing in the container, the bucket drifted down for a lesson on how to go to the center of the earth.

On the shaft floor, standing on a mix of crushed rock and gray sludge, safety glasses couldn’t hide excited eyes as group members saw for themselves what one of Mongolia’s largest projected mining projects will look like.

“Going up!” a shaft technician called out as the bucket retrieved the eight of us back to daylight in less than two minutes.

“Why didn’t those members of parliament come down to Oyu Tolgoi? They need to see this,” a Resolute Reforms civil movement member asked other group members. "How could they turn this down?"

Open minded and more well informed participants started to ask questions from shaft builders, management teams, geologists and company officials. But instead of asking why, the questions had changed to how and when.

Climbing back into a twin turbo prop airplane and speeding off the dirt runway, the members saw the Oyu Tolgoi project fade off with the Gobi’s sunset.

“I can’t wait to see it when they start production,” a group member whispered.

All images copyright Luke Distelhorst