Copper Mine

After leaving the Biosphere, Barry took me to the Ray open pit copper mine.  It is currently one and a half miles wide and two and a half miles long and about 2200 feet deep.  If you click on the picture and make it bigger, you will see a little to the right of center a shovel loading a dump truck.

This is how it looks after I zoomed up on them.  The shovel is powered by 7200 volts and it will fill the truck with five buckets full.  The dump truck will carry 400 tons, it is powered by a 3650 horsepower V-16 engine powering two electric motors in the rear axle.  It will go 40 miles per hours, but when loaded coming up out of the mine it looked like it might be doing 10 or 15 miles per hours.  Each one of these trucks costs 3.5 million dollars and they are operating five of them.

This is a Cat D11R that they use in the mine where they are dumping.

The D11R Cat looks small along side of the 400 ton dump truck, it is about as tall as the back tires on the truck.

In another area of the mine were drilling rigs that bore holes for explosives to break the ore free.  In the back ground there is a 400 ton truck parked between two small 240 ton trucks.

The piles of tailings from the mine are everywhere and stretch for miles.

I took lots of scenery pictures for Vera on our way home.

We stopped in Superior on the way home and had lunch at Porters, they have great hamburgers!

Mona did a lot of trimming in the yard while we were gone, Barry is relaxing after our big day.

There was a nice sunset to finish off the great day.