Landscape Sunrise Dam pit (panorama)

Panorama of the Sunrise Dam open pit - April, 2006. Stitched (using autostitch) from 21 individual photos. All pics handheld, no tripod shenanigans here.

Taken from the main Sunrise Dam lookout - again, well before the MasterChef kiddies looked down on the awesome hole in the ground that SRD is.

 

Not really accessible by plebs, but the SuperPit in Kalgoorlie has a fantastic lookout and is a bigger volume pit (SRD will be deeper, though).

EDIT: On the second part, re: motorbikes, in WA, motorbikes are banned on mining leases except with the express permission of the mine manager (usually revolving around quad bikes doing geophysical surveys. I know this rule because I had to go through all manner of hoops to do a towed survey in the bottom of a pit). So no riding a bike down and back up it.

Haul trucks are a) fkn huge and b) not something you ever want to get yourself anywhere near underneath.



That's a haul truck at SRD .

 

Hey, you married her. Joke's probably on you, in that regard .

Though one can live and learn; I certainly have... I've generally tried to ensure my vehicles were fit for purpose .

 

The lack of plants around Queenstown does come from mining, but from the smelting of pyrite and other sulphides back in the earlier days of mining. The resulting high sulfur dioxide from the smelting in Queenstown killed the vegetation and stained washing in the Queenstown if the wind happened to be blowing the wrong way. The lack of vegetation meant that significant erosion occured, removing the last of the soil that was left on top of the crazily deformed bedrock in the region.

(The reason I say last of the soil is that the majority of the soil was removed by glaciation and had only just started to recover since then).

There is limited scope for the development of new soil. Some plants are coming back but not that well. Not helped by the locals pulling them out, either. The biggest problem is that the particular small-scale fractures in the rock that makes the hills around Queenstown happens to be roughly aligned with the topography (as you'd expect; the topography is formed by the folding of those rocks and that means it tends to make the fractures between layers parallel to the surface) and that means that the exceptionally high rainfall of Queenstown (being located very close to a temperate rainforest, and all) tends to just break off big chunks of rocks, ruining the chance of weathering the rocks to produce new soils.

This is one of the dangers of attacking the 99 bends of Queenstown on a motorbike: frequent rockfalls onto the road. Recent works have stabilised it but nowhere near to the extent required.

Sulfur dioxide, as an aside, is used to do a bit of preservative action in wines, so it's not all bad. I think it's preservative 220.

I have two main affinities with the area (other than the fact I'm Tasmanian):
Firstly, most of my geology training at university was done on the west coast, and the Mount Reed Volcanics are a big part of that.
Secondly, and more importantly, my mother's ashes are scattered on the side of the road into Queenstown, about 3/4 of the way down.

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The lack of vegetation at Sunrise Dam is absolutely zero to do with mining. There's some removal of veg through the excavation and the production of hills of the waste rock dumps, but, in reality, that part of WA is generally covered by crappy little bushes and a few trees here and there. Further south (south of the Menzies line, where the dominant watertable chemistry is different) the vegetation is different and more extensive, e.g. near Kalgoorlie you get a decent number of big-arsed trees.

Sunrise Dam is also smack bang on the edge of a salt lake. I also worked (properly worked as well as visited in my current job) at another mine (The St Ives Gold Mine), the northernmost half of which happens to be in the middle of a salt lake.



That's standing atop the highest bit of topography near Kambalda, WA, looking out over Lake Lefroy.

 

The trucks aren't that exciting. Gas it and go - they're auto after all. But it was entertaining, in a shits and giggles kind of way.

If you liked the coastal scenery, the inland bits are more awesome.

I don't miss living in Kambodia.

 

As much as I bitch...



I fkn love my job for where it's taken me.

(that pic is of me, btw, eating lunch 3/4 of the way up Mt Painter in the northern Flinders. Not many people get to climb some of the places at Arkaroola I went to last year. Hard to see in that pic but epic field beard was epic).

The travel is hard on relationships, and I do my best to minimise it. But, yeah, not too many jobs get you to the shitloads of Aus I've got to see, and even snuck me above the Arctic circle in Finland and Sweden.

To keep it on topic - the picture of me was me setting up my D90 + 18-200VR for my colleague. Program mode, -1 exposure comp, saturation on FOUR_MILLION_TIMES, and off she shot it. In post-processing, about 5% highlights recovery in tattyshop and some cocking around with levels to make the sky as good as possible.