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

Two miles from the crowds at Grand Canyon Village, a fenced hole in the South Rim used to be one of the richest uranium mines in the country. It started as a bust of a copper claim in 1893, became a tourist lodge, then spent thirteen years as a Cold War uranium mine, and the National Park Service is still out there every month, checking the fence and reapplying soil glue.

The short version

• The Orphan Mine started as a copper claim staked by Dan Hogan in 1893, decades before it was uranium ore that made it famous.
• It sat on privately patented land inside what became Grand Canyon National Park — a legal oddity that let active mining continue right next to the rim trail for years.
• From 1956 to 1969 it produced roughly 495,000 tons of ore and 4.26 million pounds of uranium oxide, run out via an aerial tramway and later a deep vertical shaft with its own headframe.
• The mine closed in 1969 with no reclamation. NPS didn’t acquire the land until 1987 and didn’t start seriously cleaning it up until 2008-2009.
• Despite the “Superfund” label you’ll see repeated online, EPA’s own database shows Orphan Mine was never placed on the National Priorities List — NPS runs its own federal cleanup instead.
• Downstream, Horn Creek carries some of the highest uranium readings USGS has ever measured in the canyon — though the science says at least part of that is the ore body itself, not just mining residue.

From copper bust to Cold War asset

Dan Hogan staked his claim in 1893 and called it the Orphan lode, after the isolated, freestanding pillar of rock it sat on. There wasn’t enough copper to make the digging worthwhile, so Hogan pivoted: by 1936 he’d built a small tourist camp on the site, betting that canyon sightseers would pay better than a played-out copper prospect. He was right for a while, then sold out in 1946 for $55,000 to Bertha Madeleine Jacobs.

The site’s second life started in 1951, when geologists found high-grade uranium deposits in the old workings. A mining company took over the claim in the mid-1950s, and by April 1956 the first ore shipment was headed to a processing mill. For the next thirteen years, Orphan Mine ran as one of the highest-grade uranium producers in the country.

Because the underlying claim had been patented back in 1906, the land was private property sitting inside a national park boundary that grew up around it later. That’s the part that made Orphan Mine strange even by mining-district standards: an active industrial uranium operation, complete with worker housing, hoist equipment, and truck traffic, running within sight of the rim while tourists walked the same road.

Tramway, shaft, headframe

Getting people and ore in and out of a mine whose shaft ran somewhere around 1,500 to 1,600 feet deep (sources differ) wasn’t simple. From 1955 until 1959, an aerial tramway carried workers down to the operation — for several years it was the only way in or out of the only working mine inside the park boundary. In 1959 the company finished a vertical shaft with an elevator, and a headframe went up over it to run the hoist. The tramway kept running as a secondary system until it was finally dismantled in 1965.

There was even a wilder proposal on the table: in 1961, Western Gold, the operator by then, floated plans for an eighteen-story, six-hundred-room hotel cantilevered out over the canyon rim near the mine. It never got built. According to regional histories, Congress did approve a compromise in the early 1960s that let the mine’s operations extend into park land, which kept an active uranium mine legally running inside a national park into the late 1960s.

Mining stopped for good in 1969. The site was walked away from with no reclamation — no backfilling, no equipment removal, no site closure in the modern regulatory sense. It just sat there, fenced or not, for the better part of two decades.

What the mine actually produced

The number that gets repeated most often online — 800,000 tons of ore, 13 million pounds of uranium — doesn’t match the government’s own figures. NPS and USGS put the real production at approximately 495,106 tons of ore, yielding 4,257,571 pounds of uranium oxide (U3O8) between 1956 and 1969, plus byproduct copper, silver, and vanadium. It’s still an enormous haul for a single South Rim claim — just not the inflated version that circulates in trivia lists.

NPS takes over, slowly

The Park Service didn’t acquire the Orphan Mine property until 1987, nearly two decades after the last shipment left. Environmental investigation started even before that, in 1981, under the same federal law — CERCLA — that governs Superfund cleanups nationally. But “the same law” doesn’t mean “the same program.”

Here’s the distinction that gets lost in most retellings: EPA’s own Superfund site database lists Orphan Mine as not on the National Priorities List. It was archived years ago with a “no further remedial action planned” designation and EPA’s determination that “no further federal action will be taken at this site.” That’s EPA saying it’s not their project.

It’s NPS’s project instead. As the federal agency that owns the contaminated land, NPS acts as its own CERCLA lead agency — investigating, planning, and funding removal work directly rather than handing it to EPA’s Superfund program. In practice that’s meant a slow, phased cleanup: equipment and debris removal in 2009, a year of radon monitoring and soil sampling in 2011, and an ongoing engineering evaluation to decide what a full cleanup should look like. As of the most recent public update, the upper mine area is still double-fenced and gated, soil stabilizer gets reapplied every couple of years (most recently September 2025), and rangers walk the fence line monthly from March through October.

The Horn Creek problem

Downhill from the mine, Horn Creek is the part of this story that shows up on hiking forums, usually with a warning attached: don’t drink it. USGS’s most recent regional water study found the highest uranium concentration it has ever measured anywhere in the Grand Canyon — 293 micrograms per liter — at a spring in Horn Creek, roughly ten times the EPA’s drinking-water standard of 30 µg/L. USGS notes plainly that Horn Creek sits near the Orphan Mine workings, “which may have pathways for water migration through the mine.”

But the fuller picture, from a 2023 peer-reviewed USGS study, is more interesting than “the mine poisoned the creek.” Uranium levels are highest right where groundwater first emerges from bedrock at the top of the watershed, then drop by roughly a factor of ten by the time that water works its way down through the alluvium lower in the drainage. The isotope chemistry suggests at least part of that uranium is coming from natural interaction with the same mineralized rock — a breccia pipe deposit — that made the mine worth digging in the first place. Separately, elevated tritium in the water points to a real component of modern water that has likely passed through the old mine workings themselves. Both things are true at once: Horn Creek’s water is naturally uranium-rich because of the geology under it, and the abandoned mine adds its own contribution on top of that. An independent 2016 sample by a UC Berkeley radiation-watch group measured a lower 23 µg/L at the time and location it sampled — a reminder that these numbers swing hard depending on flow, season, and exactly where along the creek you test. USGS’s own monitoring record since 2018 has swung from roughly 150 µg/L up to that 293 µg/L peak.

Either way, the signs at Horn Creek say what they say for a reason. It’s marked “Do Not Drink,” full stop.

What’s actually off-limits (and why)

The current Grand Canyon National Park Superintendent’s Compendium — the park’s official rulebook for closures — spells out the Orphan Mine restriction in plain terms. Both the upper site (about 200 yards north of Hermit Road, between Maricopa and Powell Points) and the lower site (roughly 1,100 feet below the rim) are enclosed by a three-strand wire fence and closed to public entry, full stop, under 36 CFR § 1.5(a)(2). The park’s own explanation is short: it was an active uranium mine from 1956 to 1969, and the area still has open shafts, sharp metal, and “varying levels of radioactivity.”

That’s not a blanket ban on visiting the general area near Maricopa and Powell Points — the rim trail and overlooks nearby stay open. It’s specifically the fenced mine site itself: the shafts, the old workings, and the ground immediately around them. The fence lines and locked gate are the actual enforcement mechanism, backed up by the regulation; NPS staff and researchers can still get in with written permission for park management or study purposes, same as they can at other closed sites in the park.

Nobody’s hiding an Egyptian city under the canyon. What’s actually down there is a lot simpler and, honestly, more instructive: an old copper claim that became a Cold War uranium mine, an agency that took eighteen years to get around to buying the land, and a cleanup that’s still going more than half a century after the last truckload of ore left the rim.

Sources

1. Community Fact Sheet: Orphan Mine CERCLA Site (April 2025 Update) — National Park Service
2. Grand Canyon National Park Superintendent's Compendium, effective June 16, 2026 — National Park Service
3. Science for Decision Making on Uranium Mining in Arizona: Orphan Mine — U.S. Geological Survey
4. Water resources related to breccia pipe uranium mining in the Grand Canyon region, USGS Fact Sheet 2024-3055 — U.S. Geological Survey
5. Anthropogenic influence on groundwater geochemistry, Horn Creek watershed near Orphan Mine — U.S. Geological Survey / Beisner, Davidson & Tillman, 2023
6. Orphan Mine Superfund Site Profile (EPA ID AZN000908478) — U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
7. Update: At Grand Canyon National Park, an Abandoned Uranium Mine Must be Cleaned Up — National Parks Traveler (reproducing official 2008 NPS announcement)
8. Orphan Mine — Nature, Culture and History at the Grand Canyon (Grand Canyon Historical Society)
9. The Orphan Lode Uranium Mine in the Grand Canyon — Intermountain Histories
10. Grand Canyon Horn Creek — UC Berkeley RadWatch