华尔街黄金迷荒野淘金记

Like a lot of other professional investors, Rick Sherlund this year has loaded up on gold as the dollar dipped and stocks sank. Unlike his Wall Street peers, Mr. Sherlund gets his gold while sitting atop a 55-ton bulldozer with a pistol strapped to his side.

The pistol, a .50-caliber Smith & Wesson, is protection from grizzly bears. The bulldozer, a Caterpillar D9T with a 15-foot blade, is for moving the tons of rock and dirt separating Mr. Sherlund from the gold -- tiny flakes and bigger nuggets buried 10 feet below the surface at his own gold mine.


If you strike gold on Wall Street you can do pretty much whatever you want for fun, and fun for Mr. Sherlund is grubbing for gold deep in the Alaskan wilderness. With gold prices hitting record levels, it's a pursuit that eventually might be profitable for him. It isn't yet, but that isn't the point. 'Some people have a passion for running big equipment and looking for gold,' he explains.


In finance and technology circles, Mr. Sherlund is known as the former dean of Wall Street's Microsoft analysts, a market mover with the reports he wrote in two decades at Goldman Sachs Group. Early this year, he quit to become a managing director investing in technology stocks at Galleon Group, a $7 billion hedge fund in New York.


Mr. Sherlund made millions at Goldman, and he stands to make more money if Galleon does well. But his career kept him chained to his desk on conference calls and staring at statistics.


Six years ago, he took a trip to Alaska, acting on an urge for something different and a longtime interest in gold mining. Soon, he says, 'it sort of took on a life of its own.'


Now every summer, Mr. Sherlund heads north, moves into a thin-walled bunkhouse, stops shaving and gathers a motley crew of relatives, friends and locals to work a mine tucked in the hills near the rustic town of Central.


It's an annual ritual that this year started in July when Mr. Sherlund packed his bags for Fairbanks. A few days later, after a three-hour drive on a gravel road into the wilderness, he turned right at a bullet-riddled sign that once read 'Ketchem Creek.' Soon Mr. Sherlund stood with gnats swirling around his head scanning his gold mine and an assortment of heavy equipment scraping and piling a vast field of dirt and rocks. His extended family -- including his father, stepmother, brother and nephews -- had joined, flying and driving in from around the country to dig for gold. His wife and two sons relaxed at the family's vacation home in Nantucket.


Mr. Sherlund wore a soiled Carhartt baseball cap, muddy jeans and a belt with inlaid Indian head nickels. The eight-acre mine -- which he works under an agreement with the mine's claim holder -- is surrounded by mountains of white birch and green shrubs. The land is grizzly-bear territory; he hedges that risk with the revolver holstered at his hip, but he has never had to shoot a bear.


Mr. Sherlund's brother Mick, up from Utah where he works at a diesel-engine maker, was in the cockpit of the bulldozer scraping earth into a pile. Nearby, Mr. Sherlund's nephew Shane manipulated the long arm of a Caterpillar excavator to feed the dirt from the pile into a trommel: a big rotating barrel with water flowing through it that spits out large rocks on one end and directs silt and small stones into a sluice, a long bed of metal louvers that trap the gold.


Later that day Mr. Sherlund found a bit of what he came looking for, washed out of the dirt: 'There's a little nugget right there,' he said, picking up a small piece of gold and displaying it in his palm.


Mr. Sherlund is following a well-worn path of prospectors who first came in the 1898 Klondike Gold Rush and then spread through Alaska. Some struck it rich, while most retreated or died empty-handed. These days high fuel costs, depleted stream beds and tougher regulations make it increasingly difficult for small-time mines like Mr. Sherlund's. 'They go broke sooner or later,' said Fred Wilkinson, a 71-year-old miner whom Mr. Sherlund calls his mentor. 'Unless you've got Wall Street backing you,' he jokes.


Mr. Sherlund's miner origins are rooted in gold-panning trips he took as a kid with his father in the foothills of Northern California, but it was a 1998 cruise with his own son that brought the analyst to Alaska. Intrigued by the size of the nuggets in Alaskan gift shops, Mr. Sherlund asked a nugget dealer for an introduction to a miner who later guided him to Ketchem Creek, about five miles from Central.


Mr. Sherlund and a friend panned the area, but the effort yielded little more than bug bites and back pain. He did find some gold and soon upgraded his equipment -- in 2005, buying the excavator, followed by the bulldozer last year and the front loader this year. He says he has sunk about $2 million altogether into the operation.


The equipment boosted his take -- he scraped up $50,000 in gold in 2005 and $60,000 last year. But since he digs just a few weeks a year, Mr. Sherlund realizes he'll likely be losing money for a while.


That's OK. This summer, Mr. Sherlund spent hours each day in the excavator's air-conditioned cab loading dirt into the plant as National Public Radio played in his ears. He would occasionally check on his crew at the final stage of separating the gold from sand and pebbles or take off into the woods with a pan and trowel to look for new spots to dig. Taking a break one day, he and his crew shot off a few rounds with pistols and rifles into a block of wood. Climbing a nearby peak on foot he looked out over the Alaska wilderness. 'This is about as far away as you can get from Wall Street.'


After nine days in Alaska, Mr. Sherlund headed home and prepared for his first day back at the office. Up at 5:00 a.m., he shaved his beard, put on a pressed shirt and brown Italian loafers. At the office, he couldn't at first access his computer system for checking stock quotes. It uses a fingerprint reader for security -- and Mr. Sherlund's hands were so chafed from mining that it didn't recognize him. A duffel bag on the floor held the fruits of his Alaska trip, a 10-pound brick, some loose flakes and nuggets in small glass vials.


The value of that gold has risen quickly as investors buy the precious metal as a haven from the turmoil hitting financial markets. Gold futures last week broke $830 an ounce, their highest level since the 1980s, while the stock market took a beating. The tech stocks Mr. Sherlund is paid to buy and sell haven't escaped the drubbing.


The lure of gold mining notwithstanding, 'right now I'm keeping my day job,' he says.

随着美元下滑、股市下挫，里克•舍伦德(Rick Sherlund)象许多专业投资者一样，今年也增持了不少黄金。与他在华尔街的同行不同的是，舍伦德是腰间别着手枪、坐在装载量55吨的推土机上得到他的黄金的。

舍伦德在淘金舍伦德佩戴的是一把0.5英寸口径的史密斯威森(Smith & Wesson)手枪，专门用来对付灰熊。他坐的那辆推土机则是卡特彼勒(Caterpillar) D9T，铲刀就有15英尺长，这是为了推开成吨的石头和泥土，让黄金重见天日──也就是那些埋在金矿表面10英尺以下的小金片和大金块。舍伦德是这座金矿的所有者。

如果你在华尔街上淘金，你可以有很多事情可做，而且还其乐无穷。而对于舍伦德先生来说，他的乐趣就是在阿拉斯加的荒野中开采黄金。随着金价持续创下新高，野外淘金可能最终会为他带来源源财富。虽然现在还没有，但这并不是重点。舍伦德解释说，“有些人就是热衷于开着庞大的机械在野外淘金。”

在金融和科技圈里，舍伦德被誉为华尔街微软(Microsoft)专业分析师中的泰斗，他曾在高盛公司(Goldman Sachs Group)工作20年之久，所撰写的分析报告总是会影响市场的走势。今年7月份，他跳槽到纽约的对冲基金Galleon Group，担任负责科技股投资的董事总经理。Galleon管理的资产高达70亿美元。

舍伦德在高盛期间收入了数百万美元，如果Galleon业绩不错，他肯定会挣得更多。不过，这样的职业也让他一天到晚都离不开办公桌，不是应付各种电话会议，就是盯着各种统计数字。

六年前，舍伦德终于按耐不住寻找新鲜感的冲动和长久以来对淘金的浓厚兴趣，踏上了前往阿拉斯加的旅途。他说，很快，“我就象是找到了真正属于自己的生活。”

如今，一到夏季来临，舍伦德都会北上，住进一间墙壁很薄的简陋小屋，每天早上，连胡子都顾不上刮，就召集一帮亲戚、朋友和当地工人下矿淘金。金矿座落在一个名叫Central的小镇附近的山区里。

每年都是如此。今年7月，舍伦德又准备好行囊赶赴费尔班克斯。几天后，他踏上了一条砂砾路，经过三个小时的颠簸，终于驶入了荒野。他在一个曾经写着 “Ketchem Creek”、但现在早已弹孔累累的路标处右转。很快，舍伦德就站在了自己的金矿里，看着各种重型机械在一片到处都是泥土和岩石的土地上翻江倒海。他的一大家子──包括父亲、继母和侄子──也都已从全美各地飞来或者开车过来，为黄金而战。他的妻子和两个儿子则在位于Nantucket的度假屋享受轻松时光。

舍伦德头戴一顶沾满尘土的Carhartt棒球帽，身穿一件泥迹斑斑的牛仔裤，腰间扎着一条嵌有印第安头像镍币的皮带。之前，他与金矿的产权所有人达成了协议，取得了这片占地8英亩地域的金矿开采权。金矿座落在四周环绕着白桦树和绿色灌木丛的山区里。该地区是灰熊经常出没的地区，为了抵御灰熊的袭击，舍伦德特意在腰间配备了一把转轮手枪，不过至今还没有机会射杀一只灰熊。

上图：舍伦德的矿石筛；下图：舍伦德的金条舍伦德的兄弟米克(Mick)来自犹他州，他在一家柴油发动机厂工作。此时，他正在推土机的驾驶室里操作，将泥土翻倒成堆。旁边是舍伦德的侄子谢恩 (Shane)，他熟练地操纵着卡特彼勒挖掘机的长臂，将成堆的泥土倒进矿石筛：这是一个旋转式的桶状流水分离装置，一端喷出大石头，一端将泥沙和小石子冲进由金属条板制成的长形斜水槽，用以提取出黄金。

当天晚些时候，舍伦德发现从泥沙中洗出了一点他要找的东西。他说，“那儿有些金块，”然后拾起一小片金子，放在手掌里给我们看。

舍伦德走的这条路，其实是沿着前辈们的足迹。早在1898年，采矿者随着Klondike淘金潮首先来到这里，后来又散布到了阿拉斯加。有些人因此发了财，而大多数人不是空手而归，就是客死他乡。如今，随着燃油成本居高不下，河床资源消耗殆尽，加上有关法规日趋严格，象舍伦德这样的小金矿要想生存下来，是越来越难了。现年71岁的矿工弗雷德•威尔金森(Fred Wilkinson)说，“它们迟早都会破产，除非你能得到华尔街的支持。”舍伦德称弗雷德是他的师傅。

还在童年时，舍伦德就经常和父亲前往加利福尼亚州北部的山麓地带进行淘金旅行，因此他身上的矿工血统可谓根深蒂固。不过，真正将他带到阿拉斯加的则是1998年与儿子的一次度假之旅。舍伦德对阿拉斯加礼品商店里出售的大金块产生了浓厚的兴趣，于是要求一个金块交易商为他引见一位矿工。正是这位矿工把他带到了距离Central大约5英里的Ketchem Creek。

于是，舍伦德和他的一位朋友开始结伴到该地区淘金，不过除了饱受蚊虫叮咬和腰酸背痛之苦以外，他们几乎一无所获。 2005年，他终于找到了一些金子，很快就提升了淘金设备，购买了挖掘机，去年又添置了推土机，今年更配备了前端装载机。舍伦德说，为了淘金，他已经砸进去了200万美元。

设备升级增加了他的收获，2005年，他生产了价值5万美元的黄金，去年的产值达到了6万美元。不过，由于一年当中只开采几周时间，舍伦德意识到他在一段时间内可能都要赔钱。

这没什么。今年夏天，舍伦德每天都在挖土机的空调驾驶室里呆上几个小时，一边收听全国公共广播电台(National Public Radio)的节目，一边将泥沙装载到设备里。有时候，他会检查下属从泥沙和鹅卵石中最终分离黄金的工作，或者干脆自己带着淘金盘和泥铲深入森林，寻找新的挖掘地点。有一天休息的时候，他和下属带着手枪和步枪在一片森林里打了几圈猎。他徒步爬上附近的山峰，在山顶眺望阿拉斯加荒野，不禁感慨，“这或许是你能离开华尔街最远的地方了。”

在阿拉斯加度过9天后，舍伦德返回家中，开始为他头一天上班做准备。早上5点起床，他刮干净胡子，穿上平整的衬衫和棕色的意大利皮鞋。来到办公室后，一开始他还没法进入电脑系统查阅股价。出于安全考虑，公司电脑系统使用的是指纹识别，而舍伦德的双手由于采矿变得非常粗糙，电脑系统一时间竟然没能正确识别出来。地板上的露营包就是他此次阿拉斯加之行的成果：里面装着一块10磅重的金砖，以及装在小玻璃瓶中的一些零散的金片和金块。

随着投资者越来越多地购买贵金属以规避最近金融市场的混乱局面，黄金价格一直在快速攀升。上周黄金期货曾达到每盎司830美元，这是自20世纪80年代以来的最高水平；而与此同时，股市却连遭重创。舍伦德的科技股投资也未能幸免。

不过，尽管淘金是个很大的诱惑，但舍伦德表示，他现在还没有辞掉他的本职工作。