Courtesy & Copyright Mary Heers, Photographer
Courtesy NASA
Kennecott Mine from Outside
Courtesy & Copyright Mary Heers, PhotographerYears ago, I was flying in an airplane headed into Salt Lake when the captain came on the intercom and suggested we look out the windows. Below us was a truly huge hole in the ground. This was my first look at the Kennecott open pit copper mine.
In 1847, when Brigham Young and the first Mormon pioneers arrived in the Utah territory, this bit of land we were flying over was an 8,000ft mountain, part of the range the Native Americans called the Oquirrhs. Back then two brothers were grazing their cattle in these mountains when they noticed some gold that had washed down the mountain and settled in a sandy stream bed. They took the gold and showed it to Brigham Young. Brigham Young told them to “forget it.” Growing food for the survival of the settlers was his top priority.
The Bingham boys went back to grazing cattle, but by 1873 the news had gotten out that there was gold in these hills. People started to move in, many of them recent immigrants. The Finns and Swedes settled up Carr Canyon, while the Austrians and Slavs settled near the Highland Boy mine. The town of Bingham grew up around 30 saloons, its many brothels , as well as many boarding houses where single men rented a room and took their meals. I really enjoyed reading a memoir written by Violet Boyce, whose Aunt Becky ran one of these boarding houses. She tells us the softer side of life in the early mining town, like one miner, Pete Kalvos, who had a beloved pet magpie. Now this bird was the chief suspect when Aunt Becky’s thimble, teaspoons, and jeweled pin disappeared. Aunt Becky got so mad she took the bird outside and told it to “git.” Joe moped around the house until the bird returned. Luckily by then Aunt Becky had cooled off, because some repair work on the chimney had revealed the magpie nest and all the missing items.
Everything changed in Bingham Canyon in 1906 when new entrepreneurs and engineers decided the real future of the canyon was in copper, and the best way to get it out was with an open pit mine. Dynamite started blasting away the hillsides. Violet writes how vases were knocked off shelves and pictures turned sideways on the walls in her house. As the mine kept expanding, the walls of her house crumbled. Eventually the whole town was devoured.
Nowadays, if you go to the Visitor Center at the Kennecott mine, you can stand on the viewing platform on the upper lip of the huge bowl-shaped pit. It’s a breath taking 2 ½ miles wide, ¾ of a mile deep – and still getting bigger. Trucks the size of two-story houses lumber up the inside of the bowl carrying away the newly blasted debris. It now takes 2 tons of this mix of rock, dirt and ore to eventually produce 9 pounds of pure copper.
The story of this giant hole in the ground is woven into Utah’s history, but it’s also left its mark on our planet Earth. The Kennecott open pit copper mine is one of a handful of man-made structures that can be seen from the International Space Station as it passes over us, 250 miles away.
This is Mary Heers and I’m Wild About Utah
Credits:
Photos: Courtesy NASA and Mary Heers,
Featured Audio: Courtesy & © Anderson, Howe and Wakeman
Text: Mary Heers, https://cca.usu.edu/files/awards/art-and-mary-heers-citation.pdf
Additional Reading: Lyle Bingham, https://bridgerlandaudubon.org/
Additional Reading
Wild About Utah, Mary Heers’ Wild About Utah Postings
Crump, Scott, The Oquirrh Mountains, Utah History Encyclopedia, https://www.uen.org/utah_history_encyclopedia/o/OQUIRRH_MOUNTAINS.shtml
Strack, Don, Years of Discovery, to 1863, Railroads and Mining in Utah’s Bingham Canyon, Discovery to 1863, UtahRails.net, https://utahrails.net/bingham/bingham-discovery.php
The Bingham Mine – Our National Historic Landmark, Rio Tinto, https://www.kennecott-groundbreakers.com/stories/the-bingham-mine—our-national-historic-landmark
Milligan, Mark, GeoSights: A View of the World’s Deepest Pit – Bingham Canyon Mine Overlook, Utah Geological Survey (UGS), Utah Department of Natural Resources, Survey Notes, v. 49 no. 2, May 2017, https://geology.utah.gov/map-pub/survey-notes/geosights/geosights-bingham-canyon-mine/
Bingham Canyon Mine, USA, Captured 20 April 2021, by the MSI instrument, aboard the Sentinel-2 satellite, NASA, https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/news/worldview-image-archive/bingham-canyon-mine-usa
1904 to 2022, Bingham Mine through the Years, https://youtu.be/yvoQuH9C2d0?si=wQhMZWXYs-M-zclW
Massive landslide at Utah copper mine generates wealth of geophysical data, GSA Today, The Geological Society of America, https://rock.geosociety.org/net/gsatoday/archive/24/1/pdf/gt1401.pdf
