Kalgoorlie - Day 2 - Super Pit Tour & Hannans North Tourist Mine

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This morning, we were booked on the 2.5-hour Super Pit Tour. We had to be at the Kalgoorlie Tours & Charters office on Hannan Street 15 minutes before our scheduled 8.30am departure. Erring on the side of too early we were at the office by just after 8.00am. The staff greeted us and we checked in and received our hi-viz vests and safety glasses.

We were all dressed in our wrist to ankle clothing as stipulated on the website. The same could not be said of other tour participants who rocked up in shorts and T-shirts and had to return to their cars to change into suitable clothing. Seriously, the website was very clear about the dress standard. Despite wardrobe adjustments everyone was ready and on board the bus on time for an 8.45am departure. Ha, ha, if you state 8.30am on the website I guess there’s a better than even chance that everyone will be on time for 8.45am?

Although, when our driver, Wes, introduced himself and started our safety induction, he congratulated the group on being ready on time and indicated that this was a very welcome change??! Wes could not state strongly enough that we were REQUIRED to wear our vests, safety glasses and hard hats when outside of the bus as we would be entering an active mine-site. Seems fair and, again, the website had stated as much. Wes indicated that it is not unusual to get a lot of push back from tour participants who don’t think that the rules should apply to them.

Safety induction complete we headed off to the Super Pit Lookout. Yes, the same one that we visited yesterday morning. This stop is not usually included in this tour, but Wes told us that he had something interesting to tell us about the lookout, so he was including the stop as a reward for us all being on time.

Driving out to the lookout Wes told us that what most visitors who go to the lookout independently don’t know is that the pit is going to be expanded towards the Goldfields Highway and this means that the Visitor Lookout will soon be moved. After a couple of years of preliminary works this westward expansion is going to become a reality in the coming weeks. Tracey made sure to take a photo of the lookout for posterity as soon it will blasted out of existence!

From the public viewing area, we made our way into the pit and around to the Harvey Hut viewing area via a servicing and maintenance area where we could see 793 dump trucks up close and various spare parts including a stockpile of massive spare tyres. At the viewing area we could watch the dump trucks driving into and out of the pit. Wes has driven the dump trucks and told us that they speed down into the pit at 40kph and trundle back out at an incredibly tedious 10kph when they are fully loaded.

Wes told us how incredibly technical the mining is now. Back in Paddy Hannan’s day miners only mined what they could see. With the advanced techniques they have today they can computer model exactly where the gold bearing ore is, tag it, blast it and scoop up the waste and dispose of it separately from the valuable ore that will be taken for processing all without actually being able to see the gold with the naked eye.

For many years the Golden Mile was controlled by many small operations with up to 49 operating mines, 100 head frames and more than 3,000 kilometres of underground workings. This all changed in the 1980s when Alan Bond started buying up the individual leases to create one company and one big pit from which gold could be extracted at lower cost. Bond’s company failed to complete the takeover but in 1989 the entire area was combined and the Kalgoorlie Consolidated Gold Mines Pty Ltd was formed. All underground operations have been phased out except for the Mt Charlotte Underground Mine which remains profitable as it is.

So many stats were shared with us this morning it’s impossible to remember them all. What did stick is that the Super Pit is 3.5-kilometres long and 1.5-kilometres wide and 700 metres deep.

From the viewing area Wes drove us to the Fimiston Milling Plant. There was more work going on here as the old milling plants are due to be replaced with a new, more efficient milling plant. Hence a huge digger that normally works in the bottom of the pit was clearing an area in front of the existing plant to build the replacement plant. Wes told us that they have removed, and continue to remove, more ore than can be processed with the 34-year-old plant they have. In fact, they have a stockpile of ore that would keep the plant operating for 11 years without any more ore being extracted!

We then drove through the milling plant with Wes explaining the complex manual and chemical processes that are used to extract the gold from the gold-bearing ore. Crushing, grinding, flotation, concentration, ultra-fine grinding, leaching, elution, electrowinning and … eventually smelting and pouring into gold bars. Would the men who worked the Golden Mile in the 1890s be amazed to learn how much gold they left behind??

As Wes drove us back into town, he told us a bit about the efforts made these days to rehabilitate the land. These efforts are relatively new when compared with 130 years of mining and the mullock heaps left behind. Rehabilitation efforts only commenced around 30 years ago and have been somewhat experimental to date. After trialling different methods for restructuring the land and replanting it with native flora they are getting better at it.

We were dropped off back at the office where we had to hand back our lovely fluro vests and safety glasses. After making a couple of purchases in the gift shop, we returned to the vehicles to stash them. We had hoped to find toilets in the Coles/Kmart mall but had no luck. We particularly did not want to return to the public toilets near the Kalgoorlie Tours & Charters office because they were temporary port-a-loo style public toilets and pretty horrible.

We made our way to the Visitor Centre hoping for public toilets there. We must’ve looked a bit desperate (we had been on the bus tour for two and a half hours!) as one of the staff took us through into the town hall and let us use the facilities in there. That saved us from driving back to our rooms at Rydges to find a decent loo!

The staff at the Visitor Centre suggested some lunch options including Dôme Café. We walked along Hannan Street finding the lovely old building that houses Dôme Café. OMG, we are all going to look like BLTs soon!

After lunch we headed off to the Hannans North Tourist Mine to experience a mixture of gold rush history and modern-day mining. We climbed the giant 793C haul truck and the 994F loader before heading into the refuge chamber, a self-contained unit that miners can retreat to in an emergency. We enjoyed the peacefulness of the Chinese Garden of Remembrance before strolling around the more historic exhibits. These included a variety of old buildings and equipment from yesteryear. We had a go at two-up in the Two-Up Shed with all of us bar Cathy proving to be pretty hopeless spinners but none so bad as Tracey who tossed the coins on top of the ‘roof’ of the two-up ring!! We finished the self-guided tour with ice-creams back in the gift shop while we watched a DVD about the underground mining experience.

Tomorrow, we commence our return journey across the Nullarbor, so we refuelled the truck and purchased a few supplies from Woolies on our way back to Rydges.

Wes confirmed this morning that a blast was scheduled for 5.30pm today. He gave us the tip that if we were planning to go out to the lookout to watch it, we should arrive early as 5.30pm is an estimate only. Taking his advice, we were out at the lookout by 5.00pm wondering if the blast would go ahead. Although blast dates and times are published on the website they can be and often are cancelled, usually due to wind and/or bad weather. It’s just as well we were early, with the blast occurring at about 5.19pm. And it was … underwhelming to say the least!

While we were waiting, we could see two areas that looked like they had been drilled and loaded with explosives. Would one or both be detonated? Simultaneously or consecutively? With no siren or anything to warn that the blast was imminent, it just sort of happened with the smaller (of course!) area going off with a small ‘whump’ and a bit of dust floofing into the air. We had anticipated a much louder boom and a huge dust cloud. Still, we saw more than the people who were arriving ‘just in time’ for the 5.30pm blast, ha, ha! It pays to be early.

From the lookout we drove back into town to the other Thai restaurant, Yada Thai, on Hannan Street. This was a much better proposition than the slightly weird experience we had at E-ZEE Thai on Wednesday night. The food was properly cooked for starters! The menu was much more extensive and, always a good sign, lots of tables were reserved for dinner tonight. We were very early for dinner, so the staff fitted us in without a reservation. The fish cakes and spring rolls for entrée were delicious and the fried rice with crab, chicken with cashew nut, pad see ew prawn and pad thai pork all went down a treat.



Steps: 12,434 (8.39kms)

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