Day 100 Kalgoorlie

After all of my sooking yesterday about sleeping in, today I didn't even open my eyes until 0800...Gotta take it all back now.  I had a wonderful rest, and woke up to eggs and toast with a hot coffee waiting.  My wife likes to remind me how wonderful she is, with justification too...Who's awesome baby?  You're awesome.

We sent the kids to the playground to play, but unfortunately it was locked and the park wasn't prepared to open it for them yet, so we decided to head into town instead.  The Mining Hall of Fame closed down in December, so we have scrubbed that off the to do list, and began our day by going to the visitors centre.  I received my last two stamps for the longest golf course, and a certificate to show that I have done it.  The girl was even nice enough to say that my score was pretty average to what she sees coming through...Hooray...there are heaps of us crap golfers in the world.

Outside the visitors centre is old mate Patrick Hannan, the founder of Kalgoorlie.  They have fitted the statue with a water fountain, that looks quite disturbing when you are in your car across the intersection and a bit behind him, but the kids and Lisa all stopped for a photo.

Very sadly, across the road is Judd's which is now shut, and up for sale.  I say sadly because this was my favourite restaurant and bar when I used to come up to Kalgoorlie for work.

We thought we would utilise our time as best we could, as the Superpit mine tour wasn't until 1:30pm, so we piled back into the car and went out to the airport to visit the Kalgoorlie RFDS base.  We had a look around inside, and waited for the morning tour to start.  The tour consisted of a half hour video, and then a bit of a talk on the operations and costs involved in maintaining a good service.



After the video and talk, we were escorted out to the hanger to have a look at one of the Pilatus C12 aircraft that has been purpose fit out for RFDS work.  It is essentially a flying intensive care or trauma unit, and is staffed accordingly. 

I think the kids really enjoyed the tour, if only to pat AV-CAT who has been the base mascot for the past 18 years after walking in across the airfield.


We headed back to the caravan to grab some rolls for lunch, and I had to fix the broken headlight (The opposite one to the one that was changed out in the last service) and then we were back out the door to go and have a look at Hammond Park.  This was interesting, as I didn't even know the place existed.

Look at my girls...100 days on the road, and they are still having a ball.


Hammond Park is a beautiful garden with a couple of lakes built into it.  There are ducks, geese, peacock (8 that I counted), Emu, and an assortment of parrots, galahs and cockatoos.  There is also a playground and an interesting miniature castle built near one of the lakes.

Lisa remembered coming to this park as a child, and the castle had a plaque on the back saying that it was completed in 1977.  The kids had a great time playing in the playground.

We jumped back into the Prado for a dash down to the new KCGM Superpit Lookout to watch the shot firing.  I got everyone to dash out of the car and make their way over to the fence line, but I think we got there just as they fired.  There was no earth shattering kaboom, and no subsequent shock wave.  In fact the blast was around a corner, and we didn't get to see or hear anything.  All up a bit of a fizzer.  

We did get to stand in the face shovel scoop though. 

It was finally time for the Superpit Mine Tour, which was a small fortune to be honest, so I was hopeful that there was some decent content to it.  To their credit, it didn't disappoint and for the next two and a half hours, we were bussed around the site to look at the pit and processes.  Our driver Grahem also gave us facts, figures and scintillating stories of the operation, history and some local stories as well.
The tour took us past the maintenance sheds for the haul packs and loaders, and we were given a treat of seeing the old and the new side by side. 

Any way you look at this truck, it is pretty big.  They can lug around 260 tonnes of ore at a top speed of 55kmh.  Powered by a 16 Cylinder diesel engine producing over 4000 horsepower.  Each haul pack is worth just over 5 million dollars.  Around the same price as the Pilatus C12 aircraft fitted out for the RFDS.

We were told that the diesel storage tanks on site hold approximately 800,000 litres of diesel and that the site uses over 5 million litres of diesel per year.  You would want to hope that there is gold in them there hills when you start juggling the figures of the operation.

Our tour guide then took us around to the East face lookout on site.  I have never seen the Superpit from this perspective.  Dimensionally the hole is now more than 3.5km long, 1.5km wide and over 450m deep.  There is also a decline operation which is now down to approx 1400m below ground.

It is at this stage that I am thankful for my Sony Nex camera which has one of the best digital zoom functions that I have had the pleasure of using.  The facing shovel here was on the floor of the pit, and is loading 4 scoops (240-260 tonnes) of ore into the tray of these haul packs.  The first picture today was the perspective from this lookout.  Amazing!

Everybody piled back onto the bus, and we drove around the top of the pit to the Western wall where they had the second lookout, and had only blasted an hour earlier.  You can clearly see in the photo the blast pattern with people walking over the area whilst the facing shovel is loading trucks just behind them.

It is hard to grasp the size of this shovel, but have a look again at the photo of us all standing in the mouth of one.


We lingered for a little bit and watched these guys being loaded up, before heading up to the top of the hill where the full trucks were going past at a crawl at the very top of the ascent.

We then drove around to the crusher where we got to see two of the haul packs dump over the ridge onto the stock pile only meters away from the bus, and then we took a drive through the operations area where the real work gets done.

They have several different grades of crusher on site, and I wasn't aware of their methods previously, but apparently they feed large metal balls into the rotating drum to smash the rocks up until they can be sorted through a sifting grate.

The metal balls go in at 125mm diameter, and come out the size of marbles.  The two piles here represent the new balls, and the finished iron which is collected by magnets as they are fed up the conveyor to the stockpile. 

I figure I could go on and talk about cyanide leach processing, and flotation separation vessels, charcoal bonding and the other processes utilised here, but I don't want you all to get bored. 

The site is producing roughly 22 tonnes of gold per year.  There is also an 8% content of silver, and a 2% content of copper which is extracted from the gold during purification.  Of that gold, some 55% is used for jewelry, and most of the rest is converted to bullion for purchase.  Some small percentage is used for electronics, dentistry and other such follies.

I really enjoyed the tour, and learnt a heap of things that I didn't know after all of my years working around the industry.  I have been on this site a dozen times in the past, and never seen past the electrical workshops, so I had a great time.  Lisa seemed to enjoy herself up until the kids got bored and a bit difficult, but they were really well behaved for most of the tour. 

Tomorrow is most likely going to be a ridiculous drive, so I am going to try and get a decent nights sleep.  Fingers Crossed!