Im going to offer this up because it's one of the reasons I bought 17,000 shares today pender.. I used to work in an open pit mine for Kennecott back in the 90s. The point you bring up is exactly the reason I bought these shares. While Im no engineer it was a very simple operation that was used in the production process. Haul trucks, a couple front end loaders, a water truck, lots of tires, crusher, conveyer, "smasher" as we called it and carbon leaching. Oh yeah and the cyanide lake and mechanics bay.

While I never got to see the actual gold being formed into bars I saw the building where it happened and it wasnt very big.. Once a week a big armored truck would show up and guys with machine guns would take away many ounces. As long as the crusher remained functional production would go on 24/7. We ran about 10 777B&D caterpillar haul trucks per shift. Each carried about a 120 ton load and usually one or two would get sidelined a night from mechanical trouble or tires. Each truck ran about 30 runs to the crusher a shift. The pit was about a quarter mile from the crusher.

At lunch time everyone would here a siren.. that was your cue to exit quick because they were getting ready to blast a large tier of the pit.

One thing though about this is that they will be starting from the surface down.. a lot of what they will originally be hauling to the crusher will not be rock... but mostly sand .. very easy for the crusher to process and no troubles with startup.

Hope this helps somebody.. and thanks everyone for the informative posts.