REDMOND, Utah — Heavy machinery, some big rigs, and lots and lots of salt. The Redmond Salt Mine in central Utah is only about 800 to 1,000 feet wide, but it goes down about 5,000 feet deep.
Joseph Beckstead is a mine engineer at Redmond Minerals, in charge of keeping the mine from falling down and making sure employees can breathe. They use a different method than other mines, such as coal.
"It’s all one big solid rock mass, so we can mine tunnels 80 feet wide and we don’t have to rocbolt them at all," said Beckstead.
The mine has done it all, and never with any major collapse.
On Tuesday, a front loader was working on a massive pile of road salt stacked high after a mild winter because the majority of what the mine produces helps treat local roads all across the state.
"Most of the operation is a drill blast operation for our road salt," explained plant manager Kyle Bosshardt. "Culinary salt, we want to guarantee our customers and the FDA, there can’t be any blast contaminants in what we put on people’s tables, so, [what] we do is, there are certain areas of the mine where the quality checks, and we just grind it off the wall; simple as that.
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For Kyle, the work is in his blood. He said the dark inside the mines is not normal, and your eyes never adjust to the complete darkness.
"I’m third generation family. It was actually my grandpa, his brother, and my dad who started this back in ’58. And they were just farmers," Bosshardt said.
Beckstead explained how the mine isn't from the old Lake Bonneville, which dried up 10,000 years ago. He said the salt deposits originate from the Jurassic period, about 150 million years ago, from the Sundance Sea, which covered much of the western U.S.
Bosshardt regularly leads public tours of the mine, and showed how the salt that rubs off inside is pretty much what ends up on tables inside Utah homes. Real salt is a product that’s been out for decades and found in grocery stores all across the country. Relyte is a newer product that seems to be booming, and it was started by a family in Redmond.
"They uncovered it on their property, starting mining it, and here we are, what, 70 years later, and it has grown into a huge operation," said Bosshardt. '[Relyte] provides a lot of jobs in rural Utah and even all through the state."
