‘Oh no, they destroyed this valley!’ If you’re like 99% of visitors, that’s exactly what you’ll think as you reach Kennecott and look across the valley at a rolling landscape of dirt and rubble. But no, that isn’t a dump of mine tailings from the copper-boom days, but the Kennicott Glacier moraine. The ice is buried underneath.
The glacier is thinning terribly and has dropped 175ft in height over the past eight decades. As one interpretation sign notes, in the 1930s some locals didn’t even realize they lived in a valley, so high was the ice field.
