In the foothills above Wasatch Boulevard, north of the mouth of Big Cottonwood Canyon, an area known as the Silica Beds became the site of a mine opened in 1910 by the Utah Fireclay Company. Silica and clay from there were needed to make the bricks used to line the furnaces of the smelters. The mine owners built an aerial tramway that extended about 1½ miles to a place near the canyon road, where the ore was loaded onto trucks and taken to a plant to be made into bricks and furnace linings. The mine was eventually abandoned after it was discovered that the silica contained too much iron ore, causing the bricks to be of poor quality.