Arizona trip, Day 6 - December 27, 2007     

Pit Mine

I've been wanting to get close to an open pit mine for a while, so when I heard about a tour at the Asarco Mission Copper Mine I jumped at the chance. The tour bus takes you up to a pit overlook, those trucks are huge, but at that distance and scale they look like toys.

Then they take you to the mill and ponds. We've toured abandoned mines and mills before, so it was pretty amazing to see an active mill.

  • Video: Ball mills in operation
  • Video: Bubbling vats in operation

    • Colossal Cave

    Colossal Cave is located in the Saguaro National Park east of Tucson. The tour part of the cave is pretty small, but not too bad. The path was created by the CCC back in 1933.

    Titan II church

    Titan Missile Silo #570-9 now has a church built on it. From what I can tell, the administration building is built directly on top of the old silo. I wonder if they know? Site 570-1 had a lot of construction going on, I think they're building a housing subdivision on the land. Maybe they'll put a park over the silo.

    Biosphere 2

    The Biosphere 2 experiment basically failed, but the structure is pretty cool, and the concept is certainly sound. They're using the facility now for research on smaller scales. The giant greenhouse allows much more precise control over the environment than any other facility, even though it's not a sealed environment any more.


    There are two gigantic lungs that provided the air when it was a sealed lab. It's a giant room with a rubber ceiling and a counterweight to provide pressure. It's so outside of anything I've ever seen that it took me about 30 seconds to figure out what it was (then the guide told everyone).

    Pit mine at night

    On the way to Phoenix I went by the tallest structure in Arizona, the Asarco Hayden Smelter smokestack. At 1000 feet tall it's over twice as high as the tallest building, the 40 story Chase Tower in Phoenix. The copper ore from the Mission mine come here to be purified. Near that is the Ray Mine, another giant open pit mine. I got there just after dark, but they operate these mines 24 hours a day.

    Phoenix Sunset


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