The Bingham Canyon Mine: The Largest Hole Humans Have Ever Dug

The Bingham Canyon Mine, 25 miles southwest of Salt Lake City in the Oquirrh Mountains, is the largest human-made excavation on earth — a pit three-quarters of a mile deep and two and a half miles across, carved out of a mountain over more than a century of digging. It is so big that astronauts can pick it out with the naked eye from low Earth orbit. It is also a working copper mine, not a park, and that single fact shapes everything about how you see it and why it exists.

Most Utahns drive past it their whole lives without realizing the scale of what is sitting just off the southwest edge of the valley. Here is what is actually down there.

How big is the Bingham Canyon Mine?

The pit is about 0.75 miles deep and 2.5 miles wide, covering roughly 1,900 acres. Put a number on the depth and it stops sounding abstract: the vertical drop from rim to pit floor is about 3,650 feet. Stack two Empire State Buildings on top of each other and they would still come up short of the rim. One World Trade Center, the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere, would have to be cloned and stacked to clear the same distance.

Width does the rest of the work. At 2.5 miles across, the open mouth of the pit is wider than most Utah towns. If you stood a marathon runner at one edge, the far rim would be nearly a tenth of the way to a finish line. The terraced benches spiraling down the walls — the roads the haul trucks drive — would run for miles if you unrolled them.

The mine has been in production since 1906, which means people have been removing this mountain for 120 years. Around 450,000 short tons of material come out of it on a typical day.

Can you really see it from space?

Yes, within reason. The mine is large enough to be visible to the naked eye from an orbiting spacecraft, the way a handful of the biggest human structures are. NASA’s Earth Observatory has photographed it repeatedly from orbit, and the pit reads clearly as a pale, terraced bullseye against the dark Oquirrh ridgeline. The old line that “you can see the Great Wall of China from space but nothing else” was always wrong in both directions — the Wall is hard to spot, and Bingham Canyon is easy.

What comes out of the hole?

Copper, mostly, and a lot of it. Bingham Canyon has produced more copper than any mine in history — north of 19 million short tons — and it still supplies close to 20 percent of the refined copper used in the United States. The ore here is low-grade porphyry, meaning the copper is spread thin through enormous volumes of rock, which is exactly why the operation has to be this huge to make economic sense. You move a mountain to get a wire’s worth of metal, then you move the next one.

Copper is not the only thing worth pulling out. The same ore carries gold, silver, and molybdenum, and the smelter recovers them as byproducts. The copper from your house wiring, the rebar-adjacent supply chain, the renewable-energy build-out that runs on copper — a real share of it started as rock on these benches.

The 90 seconds that reshaped the pit

On the night of April 10, 2013, the northeastern wall of the pit let go. Around 65 million cubic meters of rock — roughly 2.3 to 2.5 billion cubic feet — slid to the bottom in two pulses. It remains the largest non-volcanic landslide recorded in North America in modern times, bigger than the famous Frank Slide in Canada and the 1959 Madison River Canyon slide in Montana, several times over.

Here is the part worth sitting with: nobody was hurt. The mine had installed interferometric radar that watches the pit walls for micro-movement, and the system flagged the wall creeping in the days beforehand. Operations shut down the day before the slide came. When 165 million tons of rock finally avalanched into the pit, the haul trucks and crews were already out. It is one of the cleaner examples anywhere of monitoring technology turning a catastrophe into a measured evacuation.

The slide buried equipment and knocked the mine’s copper output down hard that year, but the geophysical record it left was a gift to scientists, who captured the whole collapse on seismic instruments and have studied it ever since.

How to actually go see it

The Rio Tinto Kennecott Visitor Experience reopens for the season each spring and runs through October, weather permitting. Admission is about $6 per person, and the ticket includes a shuttle up to a mine overlook where you stand at the rim and look down into the pit. Proceeds go to the Kennecott Charitable Foundation. The site draws more than 33,000 visitors a year, most of whom have no idea beforehand how the scale lands until they are standing at the edge.

Go on a clear day. The haze that settles on the Wasatch Front can flatten the depth, and depth is the whole point. Early summer mornings, before the afternoon haze builds, tend to give the cleanest view down the benches.

The honest part

Bingham Canyon is not a hidden gem in the wildflower-meadow sense, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. It is a vast industrial wound, one of the most heavily engineered pieces of ground in the state, sitting on the edge of a metro area that argues constantly about air quality. The mine and its smelter are part of that conversation, and they have been for generations.

It is also the reason a copper-hungry country has copper, the employer of around 2,000 people, and a genuinely staggering thing to witness in person. Both of those are true at once. The mine doesn’t ask you to resolve the tension — it just shows you, plainly, the size of the bargain industrial society made with this particular mountain. That honesty is what makes it worth the drive.

You can spend a lifetime in Utah chasing red rock and alpine lakes and never once look at the biggest mark people have left on the place. It is right there, off the southwest corner of the valley, three-quarters of a mile straight down.