The Bingham Canyon Mine, and how you actually get to look at it

You visit through the Rio Tinto Kennecott overlook, on a ticket you buy online ahead of time. The visitor center is at 12732 Bacchus Highway in Herriman, round the south end of the Oquirrh range, and every visitor rides a shuttle from there up to the rim; there is no private driving to the overlook. As of 2026 it is open every day including holidays, from 9:30am to 2:30pm, with shuttles every thirty minutes and the last one leaving at 2:30 and back by 4:00. Access here has been suspended before, so it is worth confirming with the operator before you go.

Six dollars a person, with children under five free, and the operator puts the proceeds toward its charitable foundation. Tickets are bought in advance online and are limited, so a same day ticket at the gate is not guaranteed. If your plans change you can usually move to another time slot up to an hour before, rather than count on a refund.

The town exists because of the mine, but the pit itself is not in Magna, and there is no route to it from town. The excavation is cut into the eastern face of the range further south, and the public overlook is reached from Herriman, round the south end of the mountains. What sits at Magna is the processing end of the same operation, on the north side of town, and that is a private industrial site rather than anything you can visit.

Roughly two and a half miles across at the rim and a little under four thousand feet from rim to floor, worked in terraced benches that spiral down the walls. It is the largest excavation human beings have made. The scale is the reason photographs of it never quite work: the haul trucks on the benches read as toys until you learn how big one is, and then the whole picture reorganizes itself.

On 10 April 2013 the northeast wall of the pit came down in two movements known as the Manefay slides. Instruments had shown the wall moving since November 2012, and when the movement reached about two inches a day the mine cleared every worker out of the pit that morning and warned the public that afternoon. The wall failed that night in two movements about ninety minutes apart, roughly 145 million tons of rock in all. Because the pit had already been emptied, no one was in it.

Ore production resumed within seventeen days, which is the figure that surprises people most. The slide buried three of the operation's thirteen shovels and fourteen of its hundred haul trucks, and a replacement haul road took seven months to build. The old visitor center was lost to the slide as well, which is why public access was suspended for years and eventually returned on a different site.

Fully, and around the clock. The pit anchors an integrated copper business covering the mine, a concentrator, a smelter that is one of only two operating copper smelters in the United States, a refinery, rail and tailings storage, employing 2,104 people and producing 133.6 thousand tonnes of refined copper in 2025. Work now approved carries the operation to 2032, and a further expansion, if approved, would take it toward 2040.

No. There is no public road across the range from Magna to the pit, and much of the high ground behind town is mining property or otherwise private rather than a trail network. The one paved canyon road at the south end of the range belongs to another town, is a seasonal drive, and does not reach the overlook in any case. The only way to the overlook is round the south end of the mountains to the visitor center in Herriman.

About an hour on site, which is what the operator gives as a typical visit and is about right for a self guided overlook plus two levels of exhibits. The bigger budget is the driving. From Magna the visitor center is round the south end of the range rather than over it, so give yourself time both ways, and remember that the last shuttle up leaves at 2:30.