Oz Trip - Day 127

Day 127 – 5/9/2012 – Mt Whaleback mine tour and Karijini National Park

It was the coolest morning that we had had for a while. It was about 8deg. We didn't have to be at the visitors centre until 9:15 for the mine tour. We were ready to go just after 8am so we decided to go for a drive to Radio Hill that looked out over Newman.

Looking out over Newman from Radio Hill

Looking onto Mt Whaleback mine from Radio Hill

While we were waiting for the mine tour to start we had time for a few happy snaps beside one of the old mining trucks.

The mine tour took us to a lookout that looked down into the mining pit. The Mt Whaleback open cut mine is the largest single open cut mine in the world. It is currently 5.5km long and 1.5km wide and about 420m deep. It was pretty amazing to see how small the massive machinery looked at the bottom of the pit.

Looking down into the pit

The activity in the bottom of the pit - dump trucks being filled up and the blast holes being drilled for the next blasting on the right

The processing plant. The yellow stuff is another type of iron ore that they blend in with the iron ore from this site

Jodie in a big bucket

You can just make out the start of a long train.  The trains are about 3.7km long!

The tour finished at 11am so we had smoko, refuelled and hit the road towards Karijini National Park. We had lunch at a really nice rest area called Mt Robinson. It would have made a great overnight stop had we had time.

Views from the Mt Robinson rest area

Looking onto Mt Robinson

We think a mine had just blasted as we were driving past and just caught the dust cloud

We arrived at Karijini at about 3pm, setup camp, and then headed off to do a couple of the short walks to the lookouts over Circular Pool and Fortescue Falls.

Looking down into Circular Pool

Looking down the valley from Circular Pool

Looking downstream from Fortescue Falls

Fortescue Falls in the right hand corner

Fortescue Falls

Karijini camp site

Views from our camp site