Thursday 22 May, Copper Mountain open day tour

Very quiet overnight. After a coffee and shower, then dressed, Vicki and I headed to Princeton Exhibition Grounds to gather for the once a year tour of the mine on Copper Mountain. There were 14 school buses waiting for us. They expected 700 passengers. A number of them were partners and children of the mine workers, plus people from all over the place. The guide on our bus asked who was local and then who wasn't local to see how far people had travelled. One fellow said Oregon but I said Australia so the guide said that I win! Everyone was given a bag full of goodies for the day. Everything was free.

There were to be 5 stops with the last stop being at a blasting site. We had about 20-30 minutes at each site. I won't bore you with all the photos I took, but it was really interesting and they did a good job of explaining processes and equipment and wherever possible had hands on activities. Our first stop was at the Tailings.

They have an example of how they are converting to electric vehicles through a race between the fully diesel truck and an electric one. The trucks weigh about half a million pounds unloaded and 1 million pounds loaded. Even with a vendor head start, the electric truck was faster coming up a step gradient and each trip to deposit a load saves 50 litres of fuel.

Next stop was to see where the water used flows out to.

the water looked like it should have been a Glacier lake. Next was the mill where pieces of tappet were on display. Everything looked like it was on steroids and price tags for each item was huge.

Our next stop was the vehicles. Imagine a tonka toy, only 1,000 times larger!

Time to get back on our coach again as all the buses were going to the blast site.

We were a fair distance away but I thought it works be really loud and it wasn't, plusI thought there would be major rock fall but there wasn't. The sun is too dislodge surface rockwhich will be removed in order to make the gap suffer. They will continue to keep working around the rock face in order to eventually go deeper that is where the large amounts of copper will be found. It was really interesting, but time to get back on the bus and head back to the Exhibition Grounds where we were offered free hamburgers, hot dogs, ice cream, pop corn, soft drinks and fairy floss. I was happy with just a hamburger. We then had a wander around all the exhibitors who were all subsidiaries of the mining company or provided equipment or accessories. They all had give aways. Vicki and I grabbed a potted plant each and she couldn't help herself by also getting a bubble wand from another stall! We were both worn out by now so decided to call it a day and head for home. very scenic drive back to Hedley and time for Margaritas (you may be noticing a trend starting to occur here). Joe made us a top butter chicken and rice dinner. Started to watch some TV but had trouble keeping my eyes open so headed upstairs to bed and that was the end of a very good first good day in Hedley. Vicki has an itinerary board for me that is covered in post it notes and bookings so I definitely am needing my beauty sleep if I'm going to be able to keep up the pace...