Mining can happen at the surface or underground. The environment and type of material mined dictate the form of mining required and the equipment used. Both surface and underground mining have three main steps: 1.Extraction: This involves drilling, blasting, or digging to remove materials from the mine site. 2.Material handling: This includes sorting and loading materials to either go to a waste area or the processing site. 3. Material processing: The final step involves grinding, separating, crushing, refining, and smelting mined ore or other goods at an off-site plant to turn them into finished products.

Surface mining includes numerous techniques and is the most common method for non-fuel minerals . Miners choose surface extraction for minerals located close to the surface.

There are three main ways to mine on the surface. These methods include quarrying, open-pit mining, and strip mining. In quarrying, miners may cut blocks of hard stone for ornamental purposes, such as granite for building. However, quarrying can also refer to extracting gravel, crushed stone, and sand using similar techniques to open-pit mining.

Open-pit mining requires creating a large pit in the ground from which the miners extract the needed material. This is one method miners may use to extract silver from the earth. The other technique is underground silver mining. Occasionally, removing a hilltop with explosives to expose the rocky materials beneath is the first step in creating an open pit. Rotary drills create the holes used for inserting the explosives for this process.

The third type of surface mining is strip mining, which primarily extracts thin layers of coal from near the surface. Since coal is not a major mining product of Nevada, the inclusion of strip mining here serves only to round out the three types of surface mining used around the world.

This form of mining starts with removing large strips of surface material, known as overburden. The first strips of overburden go outside the mine site. After extracting mined products from the initial strip, the newly created hole will hold the deposits of future strips of overburden removed from the mine. For hilly sites, contour strip mining requires using shovels or dozers to remove strips of overburden around the hill in terraces. For flat surfaces, area strip mining using equipment such as draglines or scrapers will suffice.