The NW wall may be in the order of 1000 to 1500m in height (1 to 1.5km, 0.6 to 0.9 miles) above the floor of the final pit. Imagine how small you would feel looking up at almost a mile high wall of rock!

Below is Bingham Canyon Mine - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bingham_Canyon_Mine look at the bottom, there is an ant....no wait it is a rock truck! LOL

1.2km deep x 4kms wide - deepest open pit in the world (Rio Tinto)

I'm no expert, but based on Chappy's notes above, we will be similar in magintude. The Engineering - Mine Plan would not be that easy to say the least. I would think that not many consultants cross this bridge wrt Mine Plan Development.

Wardrop must have lost key staff - stress level is likely high with Copper Fox and other deliverables. Like I mentioned yesterday, Qualified technical staff are hard to come by. You can pull any BSc, M.Sc, P.Eng., B.Eng. PhD from school or jane doe consulting and they know nothing. Billions of dollars are resting on this work and there are only a few key staff that do this work. The mining consulting business is not really all that big especially at these levels.

PAY BACK IS KEY. Payback = optimize the processing of high grade starter pit ore and CAPEX and OPEX to the shortest payback period. (we have a large deposit, but payback is key)

A possibility - Mine plan was a bit complex and Tetra lost staff.

Another - Payback is not working out so inlude 2011 drills and Ag.

GLTA hav a great day