Some 1,350 feet deep and two miles across at its widest point, the Cortez open-pit gold mine outside Elko, Nev., looks like an asteroid crater—the largest hole in the ground you’ve ever seen. Standing at its edge, you can watch a constant stream of 24-foot-tall hauler trucks make the roughly hour-long trip into the abyss to collect pay dirt.
You’d need a ladder to climb into the cab of one of these monsters, which weigh over a million pounds each, and stop their steady crawl only to switch drivers, fill their 1,200-gallon tanks with diesel, or load up 370-ton payloads of gold ore. From up here, perspective tends to warp: Townhouse-size trucks begin to look like ants as they descend, and their operators entirely slip from view.
