Whatever you think of open-pit mining the sheer scale of turning a mountain into the world’s largest hole to provide millions of miles of telephone wire, countless feet of trendy house siding, and billions of feet of plumbing pipe is breathtaking. If it was a stadium Kennecott Copper’s (now RIo TInto’s) Bingham Canyon Mine could seat over 9 million people…

At over 50 years old the Bingham mine is billed not only as the man’s largest hole in the earth but the world’s richest mountain (at least if you’re valuing mountains by street price). It is really difficult to convey its size. This first image reveals quite an impressive setting even when viewed by itself. The dozens of layers of terraces which make the dump trucks removing the ore and tailings look like matchbox cars.

If you don’t see the dump trucks at first, squint a little towards the middle of the frame on the road about half way up the mine. Those little dots are them (the larger yellow vehicle towards the front is a huge “steam shovel”).

Now that you have your mind wrapped around that, the really daunting part is those are no ordinary dump trucks. Each one is huge. They carry 300 tons of rock each with tires that are nearly 15 feet tall and cost $25,000 dollars. But the 67 of them that carry rock out of the mine look like the worker ants whose behavior they emulate. The next image shows Annie in front of just one of those tires for scale:

Now glance back up at the first image and keep in mind that each of those tires is only a few pixels high. The mine is over 2-1/2 miles wide and 3/4 mile deep. By 2015 it is expected to be around a mile deep and to have pulled 37 billion pounds of copper out of the earth.

The mine, located about 30 minutes southwest of Salt Lake City has a visitor center with a wealth of information about the surprisingly (to me at least) complex process of extracting 99.99% pure copper from ore and about Kennecotts efforts to revegetate the area where the tailings are dumped.

Whatever your thoughts about natural resources and our planet the mine shows just how big an impact we are capable of making on our surroundings.

All images taken with Nikon D700 and Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8 lens and Moose Circular Polarizing filter.—David