IN THE EARLY 1930S, DEEP WITHIN THE STEEP, ROCKY SLOPES OF Utah’s Oquirrh Mountains, the Utah Copper Company reached a strange milestone. For almost 30 years the company’s giant power shovels had been eating away at a massive mountain of low-grade copper ore that lay at the head of narrow Bingham Canyon. Workers had detonated the first charges of dynamite on the flanks of the mountain in 1904, and as miners girdled the mountain with a corkscrew of broad steps that cut steadily inward, the residents of the nearby town of Bingham referred to the mine site simply as “The Hill.” By 1932 the managers of Utah Copper could boast that they had dug out more than half a billion tons of ore and waste rock from the mountain. But sometime during that decade the residents of Bingham gradually stopped calling the mine The Hill and began calling it “The Pit,” for there was no longer any hill left to speak of. As Utah Copper’s public relations department would often boast in later years, the company had succeeded in making a molehill out of a mountain.

Today, nearly a century after Utah Copper began digging, the Bingham Canyon open-pit mine continues to grow larger and deeper. The Kennecott Corporation is the current owner of what some have called the largest technological artifact on the planet, spanning about two and a half miles from rim to rim and dropping precipitously downward for more than half a mile. The hill that became a pit has made billions of dollars for its owners through the years, yet when operations began, many mining experts thought the giant mountain of copper was worthless.

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