Qualla: Bingham Canyon Mine

Bingham Canyon Mine: Introduction

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hermann Luyken, CC0. Brigham Young told them to ignore it. When Sanford and Thomas Bingham discovered copper ore while grazing cattle in this Oquirrh Mountains canyon in 1848, the Mormon leader advised against mining. Survival and settlement came first. The brothers obeyed, moving on to Weber County and leaving behind only their name. It would take fifteen more years for others to stake claims here, and more than a century of digging to create what satellites can photograph from orbit: a terraced wound in the Utah landscape over half a mile deep and two and a half miles wide, the largest human-made excavation on Earth.

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Image: Hermann Luyken | CC0

Bingham Canyon Mine: Digging Deeper Than Mountains Rise

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tim Jarrett, CC BY-SA 3.0. The numbers strain comprehension. The pit descends more than 4,000 feet below the original surface, deeper than many mountains are tall. Each day, workers remove approximately 450,000 tons of material from its slopes. Electric shovels swing buckets capable of lifting 98 tons of o...

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Image: Tim Jarrett | CC BY-SA 3.0

Bingham Canyon Mine: From Placer Gold to Porphyry Copper

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Edwin W. Tooker, Public domain. The first miners came for gold and silver, working placer claims and small veins. The real treasure, a massive porphyry copper deposit, required industrial-scale processing that early prospectors could not manage. When the railroad reached Bingham Canyon in 1873, everything chang...

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Image: Edwin W. Tooker | Public domain

Bingham Canyon Mine: When the Mountain Moved

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. At 9:30 p.m. on April 10, 2013, approximately 165 million tons of dirt and rock broke loose and thundered into the pit. It was possibly the largest non-volcanic landslide in North American recorded history. Remarkably, no one was hurt. Engineers had installed interferometric rada...

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Image: Public domain

Bingham Canyon Mine: A Century of Scars

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit An Errant Knight, CC BY-SA 4.0. Industrial mining on this scale leaves marks beyond the pit itself. By 1904, sulfur dioxide emissions from valley smelters were destroying crops across the Salt Lake region. Farmers sued, and a federal judge ordered the smelters closed if they could not control pollution. Groundw...

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Image: An Errant Knight | CC BY-SA 4.0

Bingham Canyon Mine: Visible from Orbit

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hermann Luyken, CC0. Astronauts have photographed Bingham Canyon from space, its terraced benches and spiraling haul roads unmistakable against the surrounding landscape. The mine employs roughly 2,000 workers and remains one of the top copper producers in the world, supplying 13 to 18 percent of Ame...

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Image: Hermann Luyken | CC0