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| The Lavender Pit. Credit:TripAdvisor (a chain link fence prevented a good pic) |
blog takes you to the Lavender Pit in Bisbee, Arizona (southern part of the state). The pit is actually not named for the color lavender and you'll find out who... after you learn some history. WHAT IS THE LAVENDER OPEN PIT MINE? - According to the University of Arizona, Arizona Geological Survey, the Lavender Pit is a former open pit copper, gold and silver mine. Workings are a huge open pit.
HOW MUCH ORE OVER HOW LONG? Some 75 million tons of ore were produced from 1954 to 1970. It’s a big hole in the ground, dug over a 23-year span as part of a copper mining operation.
IDENTIFYING MINERALS BY COLOR - Over 300 types of minerals are in the hills around Bisbee. Here's how to tell what some of them are:
RED- Sulfide minerals GRAY- Granite porphyry (contains some copper) -the gray comes from pyrite in the porphyry.
YELLOW - Breccia
PURPLE/LAVENDER- Limestone and conglomerate
HOW BIG IS THE PIT MINE? It's huge. It's 1,000 feet deep, three-quarters of a mile wide, a mile-and-a-half long, and covers 600 acres, according to Arizona Oddities website.
WHO WAS IT NAMED AFTER? The pit was named after former Phelps Dodge official Harrison Morton Lavender Sr., was also responsible for obliterating a town. Before mining operations began, the 191 homes and businesses that made up the community of Lowell had to be relocated.
WHO OWNS THE PIT TODAY? According to Arizona Sonora News, Freeport-McMoRan, one of the biggest mining companies in Arizona, has owned the pit since 2007, when it bought Phelps Dodge, the company that dug the hole. In recent years Freeport-McMoRan started covering some of the rock waste surrounding the hole with soil and desert plants. The hills are now a discolored purple.
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