Every year at the beginning of April it unveils itself yet again to the public, who gasp even louder than they did a year ago.

They can't believe how something so big can get even bigger.

Not Shaquille O'Neal. Not Mitt Romney's campaign fund. Not Rocky Anderson's ego.

Kennecott's Bingham Canyon Mine.

What has long been billed as the largest man-made excavation on Earth — although it should be noted that there's a copper mine in Chuquicamata, Chile, that lays claim to the same title — just keeps growing.

Every day of the year, every minute of the day, crews keep digging up what used to be a mountain on the west side of the Salt Lake Valley and has been turned into, no matter what you might think of the way your neighbor lets his yard go, the biggest hole in the world.

A year ago, when the big pit in Bingham Canyon turned 100 years old, it was two and a half miles across and three-quarters of a mile deep.

This year add another couple hundred yards both ways.

"I hadn't seen it since October," said Dale, a Kennecott security guard who unlocked the doors this past week at the visitor's center, which had been closed through the winter months.

"Boy they did a lot of work," he said. "I couldn't believe how much it has grown."

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"To go down you have to go out," explained the guard, who has worked at the visitor's center perched above the mine's east boundary for the past 14 years. From his ringside seat he has watched the pit continually expand, bit by bit, year by year.

"In another 10 years it should be close to three and a half miles wide and another 900 feet deeper," he said.

Scooping up close to half a million tons of material every day will do that.

In 100 years and counting, more than 6 billion tons of rock have been removed.

If you piled it all back up again you would have a mountain nearly 14,000 feet in elevation. That's taller than King's Peak, elevation 13,528, the tallest mountain in Utah.

It is all a tribute to the brainstorm of one Daniel C. Jackling, the Missouri-born miner who came to Utah in the late 1800s and decided it would be easier to get to the copper in Bingham Canyon by approaching it from above-ground rather than by using traditional below-ground mining techniques.

Jackling's open-pit system is roughly parallel to football player Bubba Smith's philosophy of "I just tackle everybody and toss them out until I find the one with the ball."

Every shovel-full of Bingham Canyon ore yields about 0.6 percent copper. In everyday language, that means it takes 2,000 pounds of ore to produce 12 pounds of copper.

But those shovel bites add up. To date, nearly 18 million tons of copper have come out of the Bingham Canyon Mine along with 23 million ounces of gold, 190 million ounces of silver and 850 million pounds of molybdenum, a steel-hardening metal.

"They wouldn't keep mining if it wasn't worth it," said Dale, my friendly visitor's center host. "Last year they pulled out $8 billion."

The biggest hole on Earth is also the richest.

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Lee Benson's column runs Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com and faxes to 801-237-2527.