Bingham Canyon Copper Mine, Utah

 

This is the Bingham Canyon Copper Mine in the Oquirrh Mountains on the west side of the Salt Lake Valley, Utah. It is impossible to even begin to comprehend the size of the mine. If you click on the photo and zoom in, you can see the dots that are huge mine trucks almost twenty feet tall. This photo was taken from the Copper Pit Overlook on a very high ridge looking over the mine. The access road to the overlook is barely passible for a regular car but not impossible for a four-wheel-drive, high clearance vehicle. I drove our Subaru Outback up the road without a problem. Here is a short explanation of the mine from Wikipedia: Bingham Canyon Mine.

The Bingham Canyon Mine, more commonly known as Kennecott Copper Mine among locals, is an open-pit mining operation extracting a large porphyry copper deposit southwest of Salt Lake City, Utah, in the Oquirrh Mountains. The mine is the largest man-made excavation, and deepest open-pit mine in the world, which is considered to have produced more copper than any other mine in history – more than 19 million tons. The mine is owned by Rio Tinto Group, a British-Australian multinational corporation. The copper operations at Bingham Canyon Mine are managed through Kennecott Utah Copper Corporation which operates the mine, a concentrator plant, a smelter, and a refinery. The mine has been in production since 1906, and has resulted in the creation of a pit over 0.75 miles (1,210 m) deep, 2.5 miles (4 km) wide, and covering 1,900 acres (3.0 sq mi; 7.7 km2). It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1966 under the name Bingham Canyon Open Pit Copper Mine. The mine experienced a massive landslide in April 2013 and a smaller slide in September 2013.