Visitors arrive here, get outfitted, then board a mini-train to be hauled deep into the mountain.

Copper Queen Mine Tour

Bisbee, Arizona

One of the richest mines on earth is the Copper Queen, an all-you-can-dig smorgasbord of 339 different minerals. Eight billion pounds of copper have been hauled out of it, as well as three million ounces of gold, 102 million ounces of silver, and some of the finest turquoise on the planet. Much of the USA's early electricity flowed over wires made of metal mined from the Copper Queen.

Entering the mine. Helmets and safety vests are required.

For nearly 100 years it was the bedrock of the economy in Bisbee, Arizona. It still is -- but now the money is mined from tourists.

The Copper Queen has a colorful history, as Western mines often do. In 1877, while searching for renegade Apaches, scout Jack Dunn saw some rocks that looked promising. He couldn't stay, so he asked a local prospector, George Warren, to file his claim and wait for his return. Warren instead filed the claim for himself. When the mine hit paydirt Warren's business partner squandered the money while Warren was locked away in a Phoenix insane asylum. Friends bought Warren's freedom with a sack of sugar, but when he came back to Bisbee he caught pneumonia and died. As for Jack Dunn, he returned only to find himself swindled out of a fortune.

Miniature display depicts one of the Copper Queen's hard-working mules.

By then Bisbee was the liveliest municipality between St. Louis and San Francisco even though it sat in a remote canyon only a few miles from the Mexican border. Fueled by the wealth dug out of the seemingly inexhaustible Copper Queen, Bisbee flourished long after other mining boomtowns went bust. But eventually the easy ore ran out, and in 1975 the mine was closed.

Anxious to save Bisbee, volunteers cleared thousands of tons of fallen rock, re-timbered the old workings, and reopened the mine -- this time for the public -- on February 1, 1976. Today 60,000 people a year make the long drive to Bisbee to visit it.

Retired miner demonstrates a power drill.

The Copper Queen burrows sideways into a literal mountain of copper, intersecting with other mines to form a warren of tunnels stretching for 2,200 subterranean miles. The tour, which hauls you underground on a small train, only pokes into a tiny part of the mountain's maze-like labyrinth. Still, at the tour's back end, you're several thousand feet from the entrance and, surprisingly, several feet higher than where you began.

With its claustrophobic tunnels and wooden timbers the Copper Queen looks like an Old West mine, and that may be no accident. Artist Paul von Klieben supposedly visited the Copper Queen in the 1930s and used it to design his fake gold mine at California's Knott's Berry Farm -- which was so popular that it was copied by other fake attraction mines. In other words, your idea of a mine might be based on a copy of a copy of the one in Bisbee.

Every visitor to the Copper Queen is "geared up" with a day-glo safety vest, a helmet, and a clip-on battery-powered mining lamp. Doug Graeme, manager of the mine tour and a former miner himself, said that the mine could have been lit electrically for the tour, but that the lamps make a visit to the mine more realistic. "You rarely saw a lightbulb in a mine," he said. "If you did, it was usually far away from where you were working."

Two-hole iron toilet sits within shrapnel distance of a wall primed for blasting.

A check-in procedure and mandatory safety briefing filter out potentially reckless tour-takers, which is helpful because the mine train rumbles through tunnels whose rough rock walls speed past only inches from your head and hands. "Sometime people's friends bully them into the mine, but they're really scared," said Doug. The train's first stop is just 150 feet inside the entry portal, so that anyone feeling claustrophobic can walk out and get a refund.

The train ride through the mine is not for the claustrophobic.

As the train chugs deep into the mountain it passes old, dusty mining equipment, gated shafts that lead to who-knows-where, and giant hoppers where ore would tumble into now-abandoned mine carts that each held over a ton of rock. Tour guides recount the history of the mine, from the early days when metal was dug out by candlelight with hammer and chisel, to the years when power drills and automated excavators worked around-the-clock. At one point visitors disembark the train to enter a cavern hollowed-out to extract copper and gold; at another the guide demonstrates how to trim fuses and place dynamite so that, when detonated, a rock wall safely collapses rather than explodes and kills everyone. Here, too, is a two-seater iron toilet on wheels, introduced to the Copper Queen to stem an epidemic of hookworm spread by defecating miners. "Before that," said Doug, "they were using dynamite boxes or just dumping it down a hole."

If you've ever been in a fake attraction mine, it was likely modeled on the Copper Queen.

Each tour is different because Copper Queen guides have a lot to talk about and only an hour to do it. "You get into too much detail, you lose the visitors," said Doug. Sometimes the guide will briefly describe the mine's geology, or relate how the mine's cart-hauling mules were kept in the dark for so long that their eyesight gave out (They were then gradually exposed to daylight and given to Bisbee locals). Some guides point out "Headless John," a human-profile pattern in the rock that was the mine's supposed guardian spirit -- although he failed to help the 387 men who died in it. Other guides talk about the time that the Cochise County sheriff marched 1,200 striking Copper Queen miners into boxcars and deported them to New Mexico.

"The funny thing is, I don't think they ever thought this was gonna work," said Doug of the Bisbee citizens who saved the Copper Queen. "They thought that the mine would reopen in a couple of years, and then they would shut down this stupid thing and move on." But it turned out that the only thing better for Bisbee than a mine full of metal was a mine full of tourists. "They would," said Doug of Bisbee old-timers, "be impressed by how successful this has been."