Week 11

Day 71 House Creek Rest Area -> Tom Price

Today 340kms / Total 11070kms

Today we get to the start of Australia’s iron ore country. We’re in the Pilbara; a part of Western Australia that seems to have been ignored by most people until Lang Hancock found what was basically a mountain of iron ore in the 1960s. There are two major mines (and about 20 smaller ones) in the region. The centres of Newman and Tom Price cater to the mining industry. Tom Price also has the spectacular Karajini Nat. Pk. about 50kms down the road.

On the outskirts of Paraburdoo, there’s the reminder of some of the equipment that’s used in the area.

Behind the caravan park in Tom Price is the uninspiringly named Mt Nameless.

While the name isn’t spectacular, the views (and the road up it) certainly are.

From the top, most of the Tom Price mining operation can be seen. There has been so much ore removed from this mountain that it’s now quite a bit lower than when the ore was first discovered.

The ore train in the photo is just about to complete loading and will then depart for its five hour trip to the bulk ore port on the coast at Dampier. The mine itself is behind the ridge at top right.

Here is a wider view with the processing plant at the right of the screen. The original Mt Tom Price is at the top right.

Tom Price is the highest town in WA at 746m (~2500’). Mt Nameless is another 1200’ higher and has a rather ‘exciting’ road to the top. As can be seen from the 2 shots of Charlotte’s screen, it drops 1200’ in 2kms. (Sorry about the mixture of units!)

For the mathematically inclined (!), this works out to a drop of 366m in around 2000m, or an average of about 1:5. With that sort of gradient, coming down on loose gravel was ‘exciting’!

Day 72 Tom Price (Karijini Nat Pk)

Today 247kms / Total 11317kms

Karijini Nat Pk lies north of Tom Price and contains a number of spectacular gorges. Due to our continuing fridge/battery problems, we decided not to camp there , but to make a day trip from Tom Price.

As there had been a late wet season, there was still water coming over the Fortesque Falls. This is a favourite swimming hole.

On the walk back to the car, we came across this lovely bush in bloom. The bees were loving it, but were a bit shy when I tried to take their photo.

Joffre Falls; another set of falls into a deep and dark canyon.

The erosion has been going on for hundreds of thousands of years, leaving remarkable structures in the gorges.

The last gorge of the day!

Due to our only making this visit as a day trip, we really didn’t have time to climb down into the gorges to do them justice. I would love to spend time down there with my camera and see what happens as the light changes. Next time?

Day 73 Tom Price (Mine Tour)

Today 12kms / Total 11329kms

We stayed an extra day in Tom Price as the mine tour wasn’t held on a daily basis and we thought it might be interesting. One of the problems with a venture of this size is that one tends to run out of superlatives. Everything is on such a massive scale.

These are the dump trucks that they use to haul the ore from the pit to the crusher.

This is what happens if you park your Toyota behind a dump truck and it reverses over you. It’s on display as a cautionary tale!

Unfortunately, we weren’t going to be around for the big bang.

We have for sale, at a very reasonable price, a well-looked-after, one-owner, recently-serviced digger that we can assure you, was only ever driven by a little old lady and used to dig soft rock on Sundays. Make us an offer!

This digger used to work here.

The main pit at Tom Price is 5.5kms long, 1.5kms wide and averages about 500m deep. About 1 billion (1,000,000,000) tonnes of rock and ore have been extracted to date.

The crusher in operation. As you may have noticed, everything is iron oxide BROWN!

There are miles of conveyor belts taking the various grades of ore to the stockpiles ready for loading onto trains to the port. The trains have around 230 ore wagons with each wagon holding 100 tonnes of ore. We’ll get to see more of the trains when we get to Karratha.

Day 74 Tom Price -> Point Samson

Today 555kms / Total 11884kms

A rather long day today as the overnight rest area we were going to use turned out to be closed, and the second choice wasn’t really appealing, so we compressed two day’s travelling into one long one.

The only picture of note was one of the infamous four-trailer “NIART DAOR” that we came across at our lunch stop.

Day 75 Point Samson

Today 0kms / Total 11884kms

R&R day today after yesterday’s long stage. I think the only thing of note to happen was that we went for a walk on the beach in the late afternoon.

From the point you could see the ore loading facility at Cape Lambert.

Day 76 Point Samson (Cossack)

Today 210kms / Total 12094kms

Today was a supermarket plus sightseeing day. We went into Karratha (closest big supermarket) to stock up, then called into the ghost town of Cossack on the way back to Point Sampson.

Cossack was founded as a port for the pearling industry in the 1870s. Due to a number of both man-made (over-fishing of the pearl beds) and natural (cyclones) disasters, it declined until the town was abandoned in 1910. The buildings that remain are those built of local granite that have survived since the late 1890s.

The most impressive building is the Court House (2nd from left) that is now the local museum.

The Court House was never actually used for its intended purpose as the town was abandoned soon after it was built.

The Post Office/Telegraph Station now hosts an annual Art Exhibition while the Customs House behind it is a café.

One of the newer additions to Cossack is the turtle. The turtle sits outside the backpackers’ hostel.

Day 77 Point Samson (Pilbara Iron Resources Tour, Petroglyphs )

Today 170kms / Total 12264kms

As techno- and resource-junkies, we came across a tour that would get us into the Rio Tinto ore loading facility at Dampier. Occupational Health and Safety (OH&S) is a huge item on all the mining businesses and so visitors are not normally able to get anywhere near all the fascinating big machinery. Even on the bus tour at Tom Price we had to wear enclosed shoes, safety glasses and hard hats although we were never near any operational equipment and only got out of the bus once.

Likewise at Dampier, we had to wear long sleeves, long pants and safety glasses. This was an extensive tour and took in the Salt Works, the two major iron ore loading facilities and the North West Gas Project.

The salt flats are the evaporation areas for Dampier Salt, another Rio Tinto operation. They rely on the most part for gravity to move the ever-increasingly saline water from one pond to the next. While it’s not too exciting from a pictorial point of view (just a large area of shallow salty water), just next to the main road from Karratha to Dampier, there was a very dramatic illustration of how dangerous these salt flats can be…

This is called Anchovy Flats. Obviously some workers have far too much time on their hands. :-)

The first major stop was at the loading facility at Parker Point. Here we could see the loaders removing ore from the stockpile and sending on kilometres of conveyor belts to the waiting ships.

Two ships in the left background were being loaded here. The ore wagons in the foreground were being emptied after their trip from Tom Price.

Bridgestone makes more than just tyres. This is the conveyor belt yard full of new belts. Iron ore is rather hard on belts and there are hundreds of kilometres of them in the loading area.

The next area we visited was the East Intercourse Island port area. Before the obvious double entendres are thought of, this was named by William Dampier, explorer and pirate by Royal Decree, because he had verbal intercourse with the local aborigines here in 1699. No smut please, we’re British.

One bulk carrier being loaded, the other loaded and ready to depart. In the background are some of the 34 islands in the Dampier Archipelago. Both this terminal and the one at Parker Point are being expanded with the aim of exporting 333,000,000 tonnes of ore per year by 2014.

A slightly quirky item on this tour was the Red Dog Memorial.

The Red Dog was a local animal that had lost its owner but continued to stay in the area and was a bit of a legend by the way it flagged down passing motorists and used them to move around the area. According to our guide, it probably fathered about half the local dogs. A movie has been made about its exploits and is due for release in the second half of this year. More info here.

We then moved on to the North West Shelf Gas project. This plant processes gas and a little oil from drilling and production platforms on the continental shelf about 130kms NW of Dampier. The gas is piped ashore, processed, compressed and refrigerated into liquefied natural gas (LNG) and then exported in giant LNG tankers. A loaded tanker leaves here every 36 hours.

This sculpture is a memorial to those workers killed or injured during the construction of the North West Shelf Gas Project. Behind the memorial is the fifth gas production plant. There are a further four out of sight behind it.

While that completed our resources tour, the guide pointed out an interesting Aboriginal petroglyph site as we left the Burrup Peninsula. We returned after we’d finished the tour to do a bit of exploring on our own. The peninsula has a rather strange geological formation that looks like some giant machine has dug up the area and just left piles of rocks in huge mounds scattered around. When you get closer to these mounds you can see thousands of rock carvings (petroglyphs) that are thought to be between 20 and 40 thousand years old. Some photos of the area are below. They show animal tracks, animals and other items that remain a mystery.

Coming back from the petroglyphs, we came over the hill to see one of the ore trains going across the salt flats.

We estimated it was about 2.5kms long. Sorry about the bug smears on the windscreen.

Continue to Week 12