How Copper Actually Gets Made — a stop on the Coronado Trail Scenic Byway.
Before we reach the mine itself, let me explain what you're about to look at, because the scale of it is hard to process without some context.
The copper here is not in veins or nuggets. It's disseminated — spread microscopically through enormous volumes of ordinary-looking rock, at concentrations well under one percent. That is the whole reason the mine looks the way it does. To get copper you cannot tunnel to a seam; you have to move the entire mountain.
So they do. Rock is blasted, loaded by shovels into haul trucks the size of houses — those trucks carry hundreds of tons a load, the tyres alone are taller than a person and cost as much as a car — and hauled to be crushed. Then either it's ground and floated in chemical froth to separate the copper minerals, or it's heaped up and slowly leached with acid, and the copper is pulled out of the resulting solution electrically.
The numbers are staggering: to produce one ton of copper here they may move several hundred tons of material. Which is why the hole gets bigger every year and the waste piles become permanent landforms.
And it matters: copper is the metal that carries electricity. Every wire in your car, your house and the grid outside is copper, and an electric vehicle needs several times more of it than a petrol one. What you're about to see is the physical price of that.