Silverbell Mine

When we left our campsite in Ironwood Forest National Park, we continued down Silverbell Road, heading west.  We were using Gaia GPS, which showed that the road made a large loop around the backside of Raggedtop Mountain, but it also showed that it went through a private copper mine, so we weren’t sure that we’d be able to get through.  When the road turned south, we drove through some private property with a couple of houses on it.  This must be where the cars were going last night.  These houses felt to me like they were in the middle of nowhere.  OK, they were in the middle of nowhere.  Then further down the road, we spotted the mine for the first time.

It seemed like we headed south for a long time.  The road became more washed out, although you could tell that it was periodically maintained.  Then the road started heading east, and this is where we thought we might run into a locked gate, but we didn’t.  We did however run across what looked like a man-made lava flow across the road.  We’re guessing that it is from an old smelting operation, but we don’t really know.  It was black, and shiny like glass.

As we were looking around and trying to decide what it was, we looked up on the hill, and a truck was dumping onto the tailings pile.  It was very sketchy looking!

 

We were trying to decide how many miles we followed this mine, on the dirt road, and our guess is about 15 miles.  It is a huge mine!  There are active mines hidden all over Arizona but you don’t see them from the major highways.  This tailings pile is so colorful!

We were surprised that we had cell service on and off for this whole loop drive.