Mount Isa is enormous in a way few cities are. Its municipal boundary sprawls across more than 43,000 square kilometers, making it geographically the second-largest city on Earth after Kalgoorlie-Boulder in Western Australia. Yet only about 22,000 people live inside that vastness. Townsville lies 900 kilometers to the east, Brisbane some 1,900 kilometers southeast, and the gulf towns 500 kilometers north. The Leichhardt River cuts through the heart of it, dividing the working 'mineside' from the residential 'townside.' Locals call it the Copper City. Heat defines the calendar here, a hot semi-arid climate where dry, cool winters give way to summers that swelter and the wet season arrives in sudden, road-closing torrents.

For one week every August, Mount Isa nearly triples in size. The Mount Isa Mines Rodeo, first held at Kalkadoon Park in 1959, has grown into the largest rodeo in the Southern Hemisphere and the richest in Australia. Around 750 competitors converge on a famous open-air, red-dirt arena for four days of saddle bronc, bareback, bull riding, barrel racing, and roping. It is, as the locals say, where city meets country and man meets beast, a roaring celebration of the region's rugged spirit. Travelers come from across Australia and overseas, filling tens of thousands of room-nights and turning the outback town into the noisy, dust-and-leather capital of the cattle country.

You cannot understand Mount Isa without going underground. The Hard Times Mine, part of the Outback at Isa complex, is a purpose-built tunnel network where current and former miners lead visitors into a genuine underground environment, complete with machinery demonstrations and the kind of stories only someone who has worked the rock can tell. Above ground at the same complex, the Riversleigh Fossil Centre interprets one of the most important fossil sites on the planet, the World Heritage Riversleigh field, where ancient rainforest creatures lie entombed in limestone roughly 250 kilometers away, which counts as 'near' by Queensland standards. Getting here is part of the adventure. The Inlander passenger train rolls in overnight from Townsville twice a week, a 977-kilometer journey through Charters Towers and the dry interior, and the Barkly Highway runs east to the coast and west toward Tennant Creek and the Northern Territory.

For a remote mining town, Mount Isa has thrown a long shadow over Australian sport. It is the birthplace of two genuine greats: golfer Greg Norman, born here in February 1955, who would become 'the Shark' and one of the most dominant players of his era, and tennis champion Pat Rafter, born here in December 1972, who won back-to-back US Opens in 1997 and 1998. After the heat and the dust, the city rewards the hearty traveler. The dining runs from Indian to Italian to German, and the watering holes, the Irish Club, the Buffs Club, the Overlander, the Red Earth, keep the happy hours coming. Out here, hospitality is a survival skill.