Everyone has heard the axiom, “All roads lead to Rome.” Well, they don’t exist in Yavapai County. Over the past couple of years of traveling Arizona’s back roads, I’ve found that they lead to mines, and with good reason. We all have a vision of a dusty prospector sneaking off with a couple of burros to a secret gold mine in the mountains—this is before he became the Arizona Lottery huckster. A man like Jacob Waltz may discover a vein of gold, but it takes a corporation to extract it effectively.
You have to move a thousand tons of ore to make a ton of money. A few burlap sacks strapped to a burro’s back won’t do. You must move unrefined earth by wagon, truck, or railroad car. So, part of The Company’s infrastructure is getting things to and from the mine site. That is the Phelps-Dodge and the Senator Mine story—and this month’s back road adventure.
While bouncing along the Senator Highway in R-Chee (according to his license plate, that’s the correct spelling), Anne suddenly blurted, “There’s a large building down there.” Since my side wasn’t overlooking the cliff, I couldn’t see it, so I stopped the truck and walked back to see the steel skeleton of an old structure. “Cool,” I told her as I climbed back into the driver’s seat. “It’s too early, so we’ll stop on the way back when the light is better.”
After some research, I discovered that the building was a 10-unit stamp mill for the Senator Mines. As rock came from one of the three parallel shafts, the miners hauled it to the mill, where the hammers pounded big boulders into small ones. As far as ghost towns go, we struck gold (I couldn’t resist the pun, sorry). Concrete foundations are usually all we find in these places, but since this frame was steel and not timber, the skeleton survives and gives scale to its size. From the road, I could easily walk down the stairs and wander the four floors. Vandals decorated the remaining vertical walls for Christmas with colorful graffiti everywhere, so I guessed we weren’t the first to find this place.
I visited a similar mill in Alaska at the Kennecott Mine in the Wrangell Saint Elias National Park. At this location, the Park Service keeps that building in an arrested state of decay and still has the red clapboard siding. I wanted to show you how Senator Stamp Mill might have looked while running, so I’m including my Alaska photo.
For this week’s featured image—Stamp Mill—I wanted to show the building and its environment, which is hard to do while standing inside of it. So, I took this shot from the far side of the Hassayampa River Canyon as the sun hung low in the western sky. I was lucky in that the remaining silver paint glowed in the afternoon sun, making the frame pop from the background.
Click here to see a larger version of Stamp Mill on its website. I hope you like it. Be sure to return next week when we present the final image from our drive on the Senator Highway.
Until next time — jw
Good job on the shoot. Pat your scout on her back for spotting it.
Graffiti might make an interesting shot???