The Mount Lyell Mining and Railway Company took its name from this peak, and for most Tasmanians the two became one idea. The mine was the dominant copper operation on the West Coast from 1893 until the company's collapse in 1994, and intermittently after. Over that span the workings produced more than a million tonnes of copper, along with hundreds of tonnes of silver and tens of tonnes of gold, dug from over a hundred million tonnes of ore. The operations centred on the shoulder between Mount Lyell and neighbouring Mount Owen, gnawing into the rock through open cuts and deep underground levels. Other workings carried evocative names. The Comstock mine clung to the northern side; the western spur still carries the name Cape Horn, after a 1970s mine perched at its far end.

On the morning of 12 October 1912, fire broke out in the pump house deep in the North Mount Lyell mine. 170 men were underground that Saturday, some working levels more than a thousand feet below the surface. The fire itself stayed contained, but it choked the workings with carbon monoxide and smoke, and the mine had no warning system and too few ways out. Rescue parties worked for days in the dark and the poison, bringing roughly 128 men back to the light. Forty-two did not return. One survivor, Albert Gadd, escaped and then went back down to help others; he was hospitalised and died of his injuries months later, and is often counted as the disaster's forty-third victim. These were husbands, fathers, and sons of a small town, and Queenstown has never quite let the memory go cold.

The bareness of Mount Lyell is a wound with several causes layered together. First the forests were felled to feed the smelter furnaces in the early years. Then, for decades, sulphur fumes from roasting the sulphide ore drifted across the slopes, acidifying the soil and killing what vegetation remained. With the trees and ground cover gone, the region's ferocious rainfall sheared away the topsoil down to bare rock. Bushfires finished the job. What remained is the otherworldly terrain that has drawn photographers and filmmakers for generations, beautiful and bleak at once. In some places the soil is so thin and the slopes so steep that, a century on, almost nothing will grow back, and the moonscape endures as both spectacle and warning.

The damage did not stop at the slopes; it ran downhill into the water. For more than a century the mine sent its tailings, slag, and acid drainage into the Queen River, which carries them on into the King River below Queenstown. The cost was total. Aquatic life in the Queen and the lower King was effectively wiped out, the water stained and laced with copper and other metals, and the sediment swept all the way to Macquarie Harbour, where it built a delta of mine waste the size of a suburb. Active mining was suspended in 2014, but the rivers have a long memory. Decades after the worst of it, the lower King still runs largely silent, a reminder that the wealth pulled from this mountain was never free, and that some of the bill is still being paid downstream.