Smithson made many drawings that propose ideas for hypothetical earthworks, illustrating his boundless ideas for interactions with geological time and landscape. In 1972, he explained: “I like landscapes that suggest prehistory. As an artist it is interesting to take on the persona of a geological agent where man actually becomes part of that process rather than overcoming it.” Road to Crater proposes a pathway built along the edge of a crater, to be lined with 800 tons of azurite and malachite ore trucked in from Bisbee, Arizona—a small-town famous for copper mining. Smithson was interested in the impacts of extractive industry on the surface of the planet, in the material qualities of minerals, and in the symbolisms associated with them. The handwritten text articulates the path a visitor would take to arrive at a viewpoint to look into the crater, where Smithson specifies there “should be no works”—a destination pointing elsewhere. Smithson is consistently interested in the idea of an elsewhere, of looking where the eyes do not naturally fall.