Bingham Canyon Mine — mine
David Ratledge · CC BY 4.0

Bingham Canyon Mine

  • 2 min read
  • 40.522° N 112.149° W

Interesting facts

  • The metals taken from Bingham Canyon are worth more than the output of the Comstock Lode, the Klondike and the California gold rush combined.
  • By 2004 the ore had yielded more than 17 million tons of copper, along with some 715 tons of gold and 5,900 tons of silver.
  • The 2013 collapse sent roughly 65–70 million cubic metres of rock and dirt sliding into the pit in a single night.
  • In 2005 high prices made the molybdenum mined here worth more than its copper that year.
  • Ore is ground to the fineness of face powder, and the resulting concentrate is piped about 27 km to a smelter at Magna on the Great Salt Lake.
  • The smelter captures its sulfur dioxide and turns it into sulfuric acid, around a million tons of it a year as a by-product.
  • Each of the mine's giant haul trucks carries about 230 tonnes of ore per load, and an electric shovel can scoop nearly 90 tonnes at once.
  • Replacing an aging 1,000-car ore railroad with conveyor belts and pipelines cut operating costs by nearly a third.
  • By 1912 the pit and the nearby smelters formed what was described as the largest industrial mining complex in the world.
  • The pit served as the setting for a helicopter chase in the 1973 TV film Birds of Prey, starring David Janssen.

Why it is worth it

The Bingham Canyon Mine, known to locals as the Kennecott copper mine, is the largest human-made excavation on Earth and the deepest open-pit mine in the world. Cut into the Oquirrh Mountains southwest of Salt Lake City, the pit is more than 1.2 km deep and about 4 km across, a vast terraced amphitheatre of stepped benches. It is visible to the naked eye from orbit, and it is thought to have produced more copper than any other mine in history. It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1966.

Copper ore was noticed here in 1848 by two Mormon brothers, Sanford and Thomas Bingham, who grazed cattle in the canyon; Brigham Young advised them to leave it alone, and they did, though the canyon kept their name. Small mines of gold, silver, lead and copper followed from 1863. The turning point came in 1903, when Daniel Jackling and Enos Wall founded the Utah Copper Company and Jackling decided to work the enormous but low-grade ore body by open-pit methods, with steam shovels and railways. Production began in 1906. By the 1920s some 15,000 people of many origins lived in towns clinging to the canyon walls; as the pit grew, those camps were swallowed one by one, until only Copperton at the canyon mouth remained.

The mine is still working, owned by Rio Tinto and operated by Kennecott Utah Copper, and it moves staggering volumes of rock every day with a fleet of giant haul trucks and conveyors. It has also shown its power in reverse: on the night of 10 April 2013 part of the pit wall collapsed in one of the largest non-volcanic landslides in North American history. Radar monitoring had given warning and nobody was hurt. Its environmental legacy has been heavy too, and the company has spent large sums on clean-up.

Getting there

The mine lies in the Oquirrh Mountains southwest of Salt Lake City; the nearest town is Herriman, about 10 km away, and Copperton sits at the mouth of the canyon. Salt Lake City International Airport (SLC) is about 33 km away.

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Utah 16The Most Beautiful Places in the United States 228The Greatest Modern Engineering Wonders in the United States 7The Most Remarkable Mines 12The Greatest Engineering Wonders in the United States 26The Greatest Modern Engineering Wonders 26The Greatest Engineering Wonders 271

From the encyclopaedia

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 human-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 19,000,000 short 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. 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.

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