Seen from a small plane, an open-pit gold mine in Nevada looks like a cross-section of the desert, layer after layer of rock cut into terraces. Another light aircraft passes through the frame, dwarfed by the scale of the pit and the looping haul roads that coil down toward its floor. Flying alongside in a second plane, I watched the mine shift from geology to geometry—an immense, stepped crater that shows how thoroughly we reshape the ground in the search for gold.