Boddington pit overview.   After a 2 hour wait in Sydney on the evening of Tuesday 15 November, the ongoing group connected with a 5 hour flight to Perth on the opposite side of the continent.   Because of the time zone lag, they arrived by 10:00 pm, to transfer to their hotel in Perth, where new joiners who had arrived that day awaited.   After an early breakfast, the group took a 2 hour charter bus ride south to the Newmont Boddingon mine, to arrive by 9:00 am.   Following security clearance and a safety briefing, they were taken to a lookout on the upper benches of the South Pit to be shown the geology of the ore deposit, the bauxitic laterite-saprolite profile that had hosted the now mined-out lateritic gold ore zone, and the distribution of lithologies and structures that host the underlying, much larger low grade primary reserve that is being exploited by the current hard rock operation.   The similar-sized North pit is immediately to the left of the image.   The bulk-mining ore deposit is hosted by a diorite/andesite complex of the Archaean (~2.7 to ~2.6 Ga) Saddleback greenstone belt on the southwestern margin of the Yilgarn Craton.
Photograph by Mike Porter.