The last few weeks before the start of school were filled with as many activities as we could possibly squeeze in. One day we decided we would go to the visitor's center at the Kennecott Copper Mine. Since the cost is only $5 a car load we invited our neighbor Brendan to join in.
Here's some background info from the mine website:
This open pit mine with the coveted title of “The Biggest Pit in the World”, has also been called “The Richest Hole on Earth." The company has been digging this hole for 100 years (since 1903), extracting mainly copper but also silver, gold, titanium, and molybdenum.
The actual "big hole" is just one part of the whole operation, but the hole is mind-boggling.
Standing at the overlook by the Visitors Center you can see, hear and feel the awesome scale of the largest man-made excavation on earth, visible from outer space even. It is half-mile deep and 2 1/2 miles wide and if it were a stadium it could seat 9 million people, so deep that you could put two Sears Towers on top of each other.
Kennecott extracts about a quarter million tons of rock out of the pit every day of the year, so this is one attraction that keeps getting bigger. By 2015 it will be 600 ft. deeper.
The hole is layered downwards, with roads zig-zagging along, and you can peer down to watch the world’s largest earth-moving equipment working. From above they look like miniature toys but if you could get into one of the trucks it would be like a wheeled two-story building. From the overlook you can watch these 240- and 320-ton trucks haul copper ore to the in-pit crusher where it’s reduced to the size of soccer balls and placed on a 5-mile conveyor that carries the ore through a tunnel in the mountain to the processing plant.
The actual "big hole" is just one part of the whole operation, but the hole is mind-boggling.Standing at the overlook by the Visitors Center you can see, hear and feel the awesome scale of the largest man-made excavation on earth, visible from outer space even. It is half-mile deep and 2 1/2 miles wide and if it were a stadium it could seat 9 million people, so deep that you could put two Sears Towers on top of each other.
Kennecott extracts about a quarter million tons of rock out of the pit every day of the year, so this is one attraction that keeps getting bigger. By 2015 it will be 600 ft. deeper.
The hole is layered downwards, with roads zig-zagging along, and you can peer down to watch the world’s largest earth-moving equipment working. From above they look like miniature toys but if you could get into one of the trucks it would be like a wheeled two-story building. From the overlook you can watch these 240- and 320-ton trucks haul copper ore to the in-pit crusher where it’s reduced to the size of soccer balls and placed on a 5-mile conveyor that carries the ore through a tunnel in the mountain to the processing plant.
The kids enjoyed seeing the tire from one of the enormous dump trucks used at the mine...
checking out the interactive displays in the visitor's center...
and looking at the "pit" through the binoculars.
We had a really fun day!
Wow! I get all my field trip ideas from your blog. Can't wait to make a trip here. And we'll have to meet up at the aquarium sometime.
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