Long before the park had a water system or a power plant, it had prospectors and trail-builders — and most of what they built is gone. What's left is a scatter of stone walls, cold cellars, cable stubs, and one very stubborn tin roof, sitting in the open along maintained backcountry trails, unfenced and mostly unguarded, because the thing protecting them isn't a lock. It's a federal law and several thousand vertical feet.

The short version

• The Grandview Mine (also called the Last Chance Mine) on Horseshoe Mesa is a National Register-listed ruin: Pete Berry’s 1892-93 copper operation, now reduced to collapsed shafts, low stone walls, and one nearly-intact stone-and-tin building.
• Hermit Camp, a luxury tourist camp the Santa Fe Railroad built in 1911-12, outlived its usefulness and got torched on NPS orders in 1936 — what’s left is foundations, a buried cold cellar, and tramway hardware.
• Bass Camp, upriver on the north side, was pioneer William Wallace Bass’s base of operations for 36 years: a rock-shelter camp, a fire-pit camp, and a 1906 cable tramway whose cut cables still hang on the schist.
• None of these three sites is closed to the public — unlike the fenced-off Orphan Mine, they sit along permitted backcountry trails. What keeps them intact is a federal regulation against touching them, not a gate.
• This page covers ruins outside the scope of this project’s dedicated mine dossiers — see Orphan Mine for that uranium-and-copper operation’s own fuller story.

The mine that predates the park

Pete Berry staked a copper claim on Horseshoe Mesa and called it the Last Chance. Between July 1892 and February 1893 he built a trail down to it — steep enough that the modern six-mile roundtrip version drops 2,600 feet in a hurry — purely to get ore out and supplies in as fast as possible. The ore itself was remarkable: over 70% pure copper, good enough to win a prize at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. A visitor in 1910 described a working industrial camp, not a prospector’s shack: “bunkhouses and boarding houses of the miners, the corral for the burros used in packing ore to the surface, and several small sleeping cottages for travelers.”

It didn’t last. Berry and his partners sold out to the Canyon Copper Company in 1901, and by 1907 the bottom had dropped out of the copper market — new processing methods made low-grade ore competitive, and hauling high-grade rock out of a canyon by mule stopped making financial sense. Mining had already stopped by 1913, when William Randolph Hearst bought the property; the trail fell into disrepair under his ownership until the National Park Service finally wrested control of the site away from him in 1940.

By the time federal surveyors documented the site for its 1974 National Register listing, it was formally in ruins. Their field notes read like an inventory of decay: several low stone walls marking where buildings used to stand, one mine shaft (its support beams still in place) about a third filled with silt, another shaft perched above its own tailings pile, and collapsed wooden structures scattered around. One building beat the odds — a roughly 30-by-12-foot structure of stone laid in adobe, its four walls still standing about six feet high, though most of its corrugated tin siding is gone and about half its tin roof has fallen in. The whole listed district covers 62 acres, a rectangle drawn 300 yards out from the old silted-in shaft in three directions and 200 yards north of that one surviving stone building.

The camp that got burned on purpose

If Grandview was a working mine that decayed, Hermit Camp was a resort that got deliberately erased. The Santa Fe Railroad built it in 1911-12 down on the Tonto Platform near Hermit Creek — the Santa Fe Land Improvement Company surveyed the route, the L.J. Smith Construction Company built the trail and facilities, and the whole project cost roughly $100,000, a serious sum for the era. It predated Phantom Ranch by about a decade, and in its prime it out-classed anything else below the rim: a tramway running down from the South Rim, a working automobile for getting around camp, a Fred Harvey Company chef, well-appointed tent cabins with stoves and Native American rugs, plus electricity, showers, and telephone service — amenities that were not standard issue for 1910s backcountry camping anywhere in the country.

The Depression killed it. The railroad abandoned the operation in the early 1930s, and rather than let it keep decaying in place, the NPS ordered the company to dismantle what was left and clean the site up in 1936. The company obliged in the most literal sense available: people gathered at Grand Canyon Village to watch the bonfire as crews torched whatever remained. What survived the fire is what doesn’t burn: concrete building foundations and sidewalks, an underground cold cellar, a corral, and the tramway’s concrete footings, steel wheels, and cables.

Hermit Camp wasn’t the only structure in that drainage. Louis D. Boucher — the actual “hermit” the creek and trail are named for, despite being, by contemporary accounts, sociable rather than reclusive — lived in the area for about 20 years, built the separate Boucher Trail west of Hermit Trail, and put up seasonal residences at Dripping Springs and near Boucher Creek. And not everything below the rim in this corridor has collapsed: a historic masonry rest house still stands at Santa Maria Spring, a functioning structure rather than a ruin, offering a trickle of spring water to hikers the way it has for decades.

The pioneer’s camp across the river

William Wallace Bass ran a very different kind of operation on the north side of the Colorado, out of what’s known as Bass Camp at the head of the South Bass Trail. The trail itself drops nearly 4,400 vertical feet over seven miles to the river, and Bass built a chain of small camps along the way rather than one central facility. About a mile above the river he built Rock Camp: a shelter under an overhanging rock ledge where he stored food, a portable forge, an anvil, and other gear — useful both as an overnight stop for tourists and a place to water pack animals. At the river itself, River Camp was simpler still: a tent with a stone fireplace where visitors could spend the night before crossing or heading back up. The fire pit is still there.

The crossing itself was the real engineering problem, and in 1906 Bass solved it by building a cable tramway anchored into the schist on both banks — a cable car that could carry several people and gear, or a single pack animal, across the river. The National Park Service pulled the actual crossing cables out in the 1960s once they’d become a hazard to rafting parties, but five cables are still anchored into the rock running down toward the river, along with the wrecked remains of the cable car itself. NPS rehabilitated more than four miles of the original trail in 2004-2005, keeping the route usable without rebuilding what Bass actually left behind.

What’s actually off-limits (and why)

None of these three sites — Horseshoe Mesa’s Grandview Mine, Hermit Camp, or Bass Camp along the South Bass Trail — appears as a closed or restricted area anywhere in the current Superintendent’s Compendium. That’s a real distinction from a site like the Orphan Mine, which is fenced, gated, and closed to public entry outright because it’s still radioactive and structurally hazardous. These three sites sit in the open along permitted backcountry routes; anyone with the right backcountry permit and the legs for it can walk up to the stone walls at Horseshoe Mesa, the foundations at Hermit Camp, or the cable stubs at Bass Rapid.

What protects them instead is federal law that applies park-wide, not a site-specific closure. Under 36 CFR § 2.1(a)(6), it’s a federal offense in any unit of the National Park System to go “possessing, destroying, injuring, defacing, removing, digging, or disturbing a structure or its furnishing or fixtures, or other cultural or archeological resources” — meaning the ruins can be looked at, photographed, and walked around, but not touched, dug into, or carried off, no matter how tempting a rusted winch gear or a loose piece of tramway cable might look. It’s a quieter kind of protection than a fence, and it depends entirely on people leaving things exactly where they found them.

The through-line across all three is the same: the canyon made every one of these ventures brutally expensive to run and nearly as expensive to abandon cleanly. Nobody hauled the winches, the tent frames, or the cable cars back out. They’re still down there because getting them out was exactly as hard the second time as the first.

Sources

1. Grandview Mine, National Register of Historic Places Inventory-Nomination Form — National Park Service / npshistory.com
2. Grandview Trail — Nature, Culture and History at the Grand Canyon (Grand Canyon Historical Society)
3. Hermit Trail — Nature, Culture and History at the Grand Canyon (Grand Canyon Historical Society)
4. Hermit Trail (official trail brochure) — National Park Service / npshistory.com
5. South Bass Trail — Nature, Culture and History at the Grand Canyon (Grand Canyon Historical Society)
6. Grand Canyon National Park Superintendent's Compendium, effective June 16, 2026 — National Park Service
7. 36 CFR § 2.1 — Preservation of natural, cultural and archeological resources — Electronic Code of Federal Regulations