Queen Mine

Behold the entrance to the Queen Mine, a labyrinth of old mine shafts below Bisbee, Arizona, that produced six billion dollars worth of copper, gold, silver, lead, and zync between 1870 and 1970. Now a museum, it's one of the best mine tours in the country, if you're into these kinda things. We are, so kick back and join us as we descend 1,500 feet into the bowels of one of the most famous mines in North America.

For twelve bucks admission, they gave us slickers and hard hats with a headlight, just like the miners wore. Then everyone jumped on a little train, just like the kind you see kiddies riding at the mall during Christmas (except it was made out of metal and not plastic) and off we went into the darkness.

About 200 feet inside the mountain, our tour guide stopped the mini-train and asked if everyone was okay and said now was the time to speak if claustrophobia was taking over. We were doing just fine until the power of suggestion kicked in; suddenly we were stricken with unwanted thoughts about earthquakes and recent mine tradgedies and bad earth gas. This lasted for 30 seconds or so, until we smiled at the thought of how much our attorneys could sue this place for in event of a catastrophe.

Claustrophobia can be a spooky headspace, for sure. We've never succumbed to it, but have witnessed other people suddenly wig out when trapped inside a confined space. Matter of fact, just a couple of days prior at the Titan II missile museum (see below posting), some dude freaked while in the launch control room and had to be rushed out. In our opinion, the Queen Mine, with its rotten timber cribbing holding up narrow shafts filled with dank air offered 100x the impetus for someone to go bat shit.

Our tour guide stopped several times along the way, including a huge cavern called a stope, where miners had removed thousands of tons of rock to access a rich vein of copper ore. We took some photos but the cavern was so massive and dark, nothing turned out. Here we have the guide explaining how the blasting process occurred: holes were drilled 7 feet into rock and filled with sticks of TNT. Then Kaboom! The next several hours would be spent loading blasted rock onto outgoing train carts and building cribbing to support the walls from caving in. Working in the mine was a constant cycle of drilling holes, blowing up rock, hauling out the rock, and then hauling in timbers to keep the ceiling from dropping on everyone.

Over its 100 year operation, the Queen Mine produced 8,032,352,000 lbs of copper, 2,871,786 ounces of gold, 77,162,986 ounces of silver, 304,627,600 lbs of lead and 371,945,900 lbs of zinc. No exact figure exists on how much poop was hauled out over the century of operation, but this butt dropper cart, with dual leather seating and foot rest, probably carried away more nuggets in one week than all the silver and gold combined.

Ruins

Twenty miles north of the Mexico border you'll find Tumacácori National Historic Park, a Jesuit mission founded by Spanish Padre Eusebio Francisco Kino in 1691 and the location a bloody O'odham Indian uprising in 1751.

Inside, a cross made of flowers adorns the crumbling chancel wall.


Outside, a grave with no name is covered in stones.






At Casa Grande National Monument, the eroding walls from a 13th century Hohokam Indian village are the only remaining sign of an ancient civilization that flourished for centuries before disappearing into the folds of history.

Now a ghost town, Fairbank on the San Pedro River was a once a thriving depot town during the height of the silver and copper mining era in the late 1800's.

Desert Cemetary

A purple kitten greets visitors.

Storm clouds crest above the angels of Journey.

















Some graves are remarkable spartan.
















Some graves are remarkably ornate.






None have headstones, only simple wooden crosses.


Framed by distant mountians.

San Xavier Mission

A Tohono Indian girl sits in front of the San Xavier Mission, also called "The White Dove of the Desert."


The mission was founded in 1699 by Spanish Priest Eusebio Francisco Kino.





The serpent door handle reminds parishoners that sin lurks everywhere.


A lion stands guard before the white cross of calvary.

Titan of War

Buried in the desert south of Tucson sits the only remaining Titan II Intercontinental Ballistic Missile site in the United States. Once the backbone of the United States nuclear missile arsenal, the Titans were made obsolete by the Minuteman series (500 Minuteman IIIs are presently located in North Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming) as well as nuclear weapons on submarines and heavy bombers. Following the signing of the Salt II Treaty in 1982, sixty Titan II sites in Arizona, Arkansas, and Nebraska were decomissioned and all the missiles, except for this one, were removed from their silos and dismantled. Today, USAF Titan Missile Complex 571-7 is a museum to a Cold War relic from the era when peace was never fully won; it was only kept minute to minute.

Above ground, there isn't much to see, other than a huge cement door on tracks. Since the other Titan silos were dynamited into rubble piles after the Salt II Treaty, one of the requirements for establishment of the Titan museum (other than removal of the warhead) was placement of barriers on the tracks so the door could not be opened. Russian satelites watching from high above regularly check on the site to make sure no funny business is taking place. Not that sneaking one additional missile into the current U.S. arsenal of 3,700 nuclear weapons would make much of a difference, but hey, an agreement is an agreement.

Five stories below the surface is the launch control center. Protected by concrete walls several feet thick and steel blast doors weighing 6,000 pounds, the room is designed to withstand either a direct hit from an incoming warhead or accidental explosion of the bad boy sitting 250 feet away.

Another fascinating engineering feature was how the entire complex sits suspended on massive springs. A necessary component, when you consider over 400,000 pounds of thrust would be pushing an object weighing 270,000 pounds out of a hole in the ground.

A total of four airmen would be inside the complex at any given time. Every 12 hours, two man crews would rotate duty at the control center. Had the relationship between Moscow and Washington DC ever spiraled into Def Con 1, a series of numbers and letters would be transmitted over the speaker atop the control panel. Both airmen would write the code in notebooks. They would then switch notebooks and the code was read again.

The airmen would then open this cabinet (each had the combination to one of the locks) and compare the launch code to the codes inside. If there was a match, a numerical code would be revealed. This number was entered into the control panel and unlocked a butterfly valve inside the booster rocket of the missile, allowing the propellant fuels to combine for ignition and lift off. Then the airmen would simultaneously turn the launch key at their stations and thirty minutes later, the warhead would reach its target. Both men carried .38 revolvers on their belts, in the event the threat of force was necessary to ensure the launch order was followed to completion.


The Titan II carried the largest thermonuclear warhead ever deployed in the U.S. arsenal. With a yield of 9 megatons, the Titan II warhead had 700 times more power than Little Boy, the first nuclear bomb used in WWII (15 kilotons). The blast alone from a Titan II warhead would result in a fireball 1 mile wide lasting 12 seconds. The radiated heat could be fatal to a 20 mile radius. Blast effects would collapse most residential and industrial structures within a 10 mile radius. Within 3.5 miles, virtually all above-ground structures would be destroyed and blast effects would inflict near 100% fatalities. Envisioning the destruction these weapons can render is mind boggling, especially when you consider some 27,000 active nuclear weapons are currently deployed throughout the world.

If a launch ever occurred, the crews had 30 days of food and water and perhaps two weeks of oxygen within the complex. At some point, they would have to enter a new world, a nuclear world. And they would've been among the very few people on earth still alive.

South by Southwest

We've just returned from a glorious week in southern Arizona, and hewww doggies, do we have some good stuff on the way. In no particular order, upcoming posts will include:

1. The Tucson Gem Show
2. A tour of the only ICBM site in the world open to the public
3. Spanish missions founded in the 16th century
4. Old ghost towns and abandoned ruins from 13th century civilizations
5. An abandoned copper mine
6. Tombstone, AZ (home to the famous shootout at the OK corral)
7. Random scenery, like this photo of a grandaddy Saguaro cactus from the outskirts of Tucson.

We're glad to be back posting original material for you. As much as we enjoy occasional diversions about postcards and whatnot, our goal has always been to provide an authentic mix of words and photographs.

But that is often easier said than done, especially in the winter when there's just not a lot happening. We've opted to avoid the Filler Trap (posting about personal minutae, political and religous musings, and private matters better kept secret) so many other blogs fall into and instead share our perceptions about time and place and the absurd and the sublime, spiced up with RR guerilla photography. We'll never have advertising here, nor will we ever charge an access fee (not because we wouldn't like to make some extra dough, mind you. But with all of thirty daily readers, most of whom being people we know- a money truck this site will never be). We're having fun though and that's all that matters so thank you for your loyal patronage and occasional comments and emails.

Here are some teasers from our trip to the southwest:

A ferruginous hawk takes wing from an earthly perch.

Jesus stands below a cliffside shrine to the recently (and not so recently) departed.


Mexican woman making tortillas over an open fire.

Heavy metal angels hover above a garden in Bisbee, AZ.






Memorial to Army Indian scouts at Fort Huachuca, AZ.


This is what Nogales, Mexico looks like. Avoid at all costs, unless you like skeevy towns that smell of pollution and raw sewage. Walking the streets of Nogales is like being transported to the third world, within fifty yards of the United States. Pharmacies sell all sorts of drugs that can only obtained with perscriptions in the US and trinket shops peddle everything from fake Cuban cigars to ostrich leather cowboy boots. On the sidewalks, below dangling live powerlines swinging in the breeze, circus barkers yelled at us to come inside their stores or encounter bandidos around the corner (we kept walking and saw no bandidos). At one Mexican blanket store, the proprietor led us to the back where a bottle of brown tequila with no label sat on a table and offered to pour us a few shots. Uh, no thanks, we replied, that shit looks like used turpentine. At all the businesses we visited, employees followed us like we were kleptomaniacs intent on stealing their fake Gucci purses or Corona salt and pepper shakers. We quickly became discourged with shopping in Nogales and sought refuge at the historic Hotel Regis for a couple of Tecates with lime wedges, and laughed about this crazy place, south of the border.