Part 4/8:
Watching the mine operations is nothing short of mesmerizing. A series of double-stacked shipping containers lines a road within the pit to prevent falling rocks from obstructing truck traffic. These trucks transport ore up a two-mile gravel haul road to a rock crusher with a capacity of 200,000 tons per day. The rock is further processed through a three-mile-long conveyor belt system that replaces the railway used in previous decades.
The mining technique involves blasting holes into the rock, packing them with explosives to fragment the material before loading it onto haul trucks. Unfortunately, our tour missed a scheduled blast by just ten minutes, illustrating the precise timing required for such operations.