The Ruth Copper Pit

A few miles west of Ely, on the road toward the community of Ruth, the highway crests a ridge and a driver looks down into something that stops conversation. The Ruth copper pit is an enormous open excavation, hundreds of feet deep, the accumulated result of a century of copper extraction in the hills above the Steptoe Valley. It is one of the great open-pit mines of the American West, and seeing it is one of those experiences that description cannot quite prepare you for.

Open-pit copper mining works by removing enormous volumes of rock to reach ore deposits that would otherwise be inaccessible. The ratio of rock moved to metal recovered is staggering. The ore in the Ruth area was first identified by the Nevada Consolidated Copper Company in the early nineteen hundreds, which built a processing plant and constructed the Nevada Northern Railway specifically to export the metal. The mine operated through most of the twentieth century with interruptions when copper prices fell and the economics turned negative.

From the pit overlook, the scale is immediate and difficult to process. The haul trucks working the floor of the pit are enormous machines and they look like toys. The terraced walls record decades of blasting and removal in layers of differently colored rock. Beneath those layers is the reason that Ely exists, the reason the Nevada Northern Railway was built, and the reason the Hotel Nevada stands on the main street downtown. It is an honest landscape, one that does not try to disguise what it is or what it built.