William Wallace Bass spent thirty years building a business out of trails, cable trams, and a canyon most people thought was just scenery. Buried in that business was an asbestos claim in a side canyon named for the Colorado River itself — ore good enough that buyers in China and France paid to fireproof their theater curtains with it. A century later, the National Park Service still won't let you within 500 feet of what's left.

The short version

• William Wallace Bass filed a dozen-plus copper and asbestos claims along his own rim-to-rim trail network from the late 1880s through the early 1900s, stockpiling ore each winter.
• His main asbestos operation was in Hakatai Canyon, developed with a partner named John Waltenberg and served by a cable tram Bass built across the Colorado River.
• Bass timed his one big payday well: he shipped his high-grade ore during World War I, when mineral prices spiked, grossing roughly $10,000 in copper and selling six tons of asbestos at $1,500 a ton.
• He sold his valid claims outright in 1926 for $25,000 and retired to Wickenburg, Arizona, where he died in 1933.
• EPA lists the Bass Asbestos Mine site in its Superfund database, but it was never placed on the National Priorities List — it carries a “no further remedial action planned” designation, not an active federal cleanup.
• The current park rulebook closes the ground within 500 feet of the mine and its tailings to the public, citing both a significant cultural resource and public health risk from high asbestos fiber levels.

A trail-builder who also mined

Bass arrived in Williams, Arizona Territory in July 1883 and settled on the South Rim as one of the area’s first non-Native residents, years before the railroad or the national monument existed. He made his living building and running trails — rim to river, river to rim, eventually rim to rim — for tourists, pack strings, and hunting parties. Mining was folded into that same operation rather than separate from it: Bass filed on more than a dozen copper and asbestos claims along his own trail network and spent winters hauling out what he could.

By 1906 he’d built a cageway across the Colorado River strung on four steel cables, used to move tourists, animals, and hunting parties — and, per his own trail’s dual purpose, asbestos ore from his mines. It’s a useful snapshot of how marginal most Grand Canyon mining actually was in this era: the tourist trade and the mineral claims ran on the same infrastructure because neither one alone paid the bills.

The Hakatai Canyon operation

Bass’s main asbestos venture was in Hakatai Canyon — “Hakatai” is reportedly the Havasupai word for the Colorado River itself — where he partnered with John Waltenberg to develop the claim. By his 1917 retirement, Bass had built a second cable tram across the river specifically at Hakatai Canyon to move the ore out, in addition to whatever else his other river crossing near Shinumo Creek, about two and a half miles upstream, handled for his broader operations.

The timing mattered more than the engineering. Bass got his highest-grade ore out and shipped during World War I, when wartime demand pushed mineral prices up across the board. He grossed roughly $10,000 on copper and sold six tons of asbestos — at $1,500 a ton — to buyers as far away as China and France, plus customers in the eastern United States. Some of that French-bound asbestos went into fireproofing theater curtains, a detail preserved in a period photo caption of Bass and a helper “high-grading” ore at Hakatai Canyon around 1900.

For context: other prospectors of the era, men like Pete Berry and Ralph and Niles Cameron, filed hundreds of claims along the South Rim, and most were bogus — filed just to tie up land that might someday prove valuable, not because anyone intended to mine them seriously. Bass’s operation, by comparison, actually produced and actually sold ore. That put him ahead of most of his contemporaries, even if “ahead” still meant a few tons of asbestos and a modest copper haul over three decades of work.

Cashing out

Bass’s nest egg came less from digging than from selling. In 1926 he sold his valid mining claims outright to the Santa Fe Land Improvement Company for $25,000, on top of what he’d already made shipping ore during the war. That sale funded his family’s retirement to Wickenburg, Arizona, where Bass died in 1933 — sources give the date as either March 7 or simply “1933,” with no material dispute about the year. (His birth year is similarly inconsistent across sources — 1848 in one archival finding aid, 1849 in a biographical summary — a small discrepancy that doesn’t affect anything else in his record.)

What’s actually off-limits (and why)

The Bass Asbestos Mine shows up twice in the current Grand Canyon National Park Superintendent’s Compendium, the park’s official closure rulebook — once as item 2 and again, worded almost identically, as item 27. Both close the ground within 500 feet of the mine and its associated tailings, in Hakatai Canyon, to public entry without special written permission from the superintendent, under 36 CFR § 1.5(a)(2). The park’s own explanation cites two things at once: protecting a significant cultural resource, and protecting public health because of high levels of asbestos fiber, plus employee safety for anyone who does have to work near the site.

River travelers get a second, overlapping rule: the compendium separately bars visitation to the ground “immediately surrounding the mine, talus slope, and camp” at River Mile 111.4, specifically because of the asbestos hazard. And underneath both of those site-specific rules sits the park’s blanket policy on every mine within its boundaries — Bass’s included — which defines “mine” broadly (adits, shafts, pits, tunnels, prospects, tailings piles) and closes all of them to public presence, use, and access without a permit, citing sensitivity and danger.

What’s notably absent is anything resembling Orphan Mine’s decades-long federal cleanup saga. EPA’s Superfund database lists a site profile for the Bass Asbestos Mine (EPA ID AZD981680309), but it’s flagged NFRAP — “no further remedial action planned” — and was never placed on the National Priorities List. No public record found this session describes a phased federal remediation program here comparable to Orphan Mine’s. As far as the documented record goes, the 500-foot buffer and permission requirement is the operative protection, not an active cleanup. See the general rundown of what’s closed and why across the park for how that compares to other restricted sites.

Sources

1. Mining — Nature, Culture and History at the Grand Canyon (Grand Canyon Historical Society)
2. Mile by Mile: Hakatai Rapid — Western River Expeditions
3. William Wallace Bass biography — kaibab.org (Grand Canyon Prospector-Pioneer Society)
4. Bass Asbestos Mine Superfund Site Profile (EPA ID AZD981680309) — U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
5. Grand Canyon National Park Superintendent's Compendium, effective June 16, 2026 — National Park Service