Salt Lake County has a missing mountain.
This mountain that isn't there has been gone for almost a century now.
Here's the scoop on where this mountain vanished ...
The Kennecott open pit copper mine, southwest of Salt Lake City, is Utah's most impressive man-made feature. It's only one of two unnatural things on the planet that can be spotted by orbiting astronauts (The Great Wall of China is the other). At 2.5 miles across and almost a mile deep, you could stack two Sears Towers on top of each other and still not reach the top of the mine.
However, most people probably don't realize that there's a "missing mountain" at Bingham Canyon — not the mountain of earth removed from below ground but a large mound that once soared skyward.
"It was a mountain," Philip F. Notarianni, director for the Utah State Historical Society and lifelong resident of Magna, told the Deseret News in 2003.
Indeed, two large paintings in the Utah Governor's Board Room at the Capitol depicts clearly how the earliest Bingham Canyon mining, located about 17 miles southwest of downtown Salt Lake City, looked. In the early 1900s, the reverse of what we see now was true — a road spiraled upward as the process slowly mined the mountain away before the "pit" came to be.
According to Lila Abersold, visual arts coordinator for the Utah Travel Council, "Harry" H.L.J. Culmer made these two paintings of Bingham Canyon, probably some time between 1910-20, though no exact date has even been recorded.
They were among the earliest of paintings in the Utah State Capitol and capture Culmer's fascination with the mining industry.
"They are important paintings," Abersold said. "They offer a very early view of Bingham Canyon."
With more than 16 million tons of copper mined there — more than any other mine in history — a mountain is long gone and a gigantic hole is now there.
In Bingham Canyon's early days (1863-1900), all mining was done underground as tunnels were dug into the mountain. Miners were also then looking for gold, silver or lead, because the 40 pounds of copper per ton of ore wasn't a profitable process then.
By the late 1890s, all the easy mining had been done, and new considerations for the area were made.
Engineers Daniel Jackling and Robert Gemmell surveyed Bingham Canyon and proposed that copper ore could profitably be mined from the surface, using railroad cars and steam shovels. Their first report showed that the cost of producing one pound of refined copper would be six cents. With the selling price of copper at 14 to 18 cents a pound, their report looked impressive on paper.
There were skeptics, but by August 1906, steam shovels mounted on railroad tracks began digging into the mountain.
Less than three years later, the Utah Copper Company had 11 steam shovels, 21 locomotives, 145 dump cars and 16 miles of railroad tracks on the mountain. After buying out the Boston Consolidated Mining Company, which owned a portion of the mountain, mining really took off.
The "hill," as it was called, got smaller and smaller, and in 1912, there were 5,000 mine workers.
A major improvement came in the 1920s, when electricity replaced steam to power the shovels and locomotives. Shovels were also mounted on caterpillar tractors, giving workers more freedom to move about.
In fact, the Deseret News in December of 1922 reported that "a mountain once more begins to move" as mining activity increased dramatically at Bingham Canyon. "A whole mountain of copper is actually being moved away," the News reported.
It was in the 1930s that the "hill" was gone and mining work started to dig a pit. In 1936, Kennecott Copper Corporation bought out the Utah Copper Company.
(Written by Lynn Arave and originally published in the Deseret News.)
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