Superior Apache Tear Copper Mining With Grandpa Jake

This morning, after swimming with some of the Sun Lakes Lady League swimmers, Big Ed and I drove north to Scottsdale to Casa Jake's for a lunch buffet of ham soup, fried chicken, buttery whole grain bread and strawberries.

After lunch Spencer Jack and Hank Frank's grandpa suggested seeing some superior scenery by driving to Superior, where SJ and HF's grandpa wanted to visit the World's Smallest Museum to see if there was any validity to that museum's claim to have on display the world's biggest Apache Tear.

We got to Superior to soon discover the World's Smallest Museum was closed. Jake was determined to see the supposed world's biggest Apache Tear, so we opted to visually break in to the museum via looking through a window.

Looking through the World's Smallest Museum's window Jake was able to see the Apache Tear display and was able to determine that the World's Smallest Museum's Apache Tear was bigger than Jake's biggest Apache Tear.

After the museum visit our driver pointed the under powered Honda to a hilly mountain road, with a HUGE copper mine operation our destination goal. We got to the copper mine to find the access to the copper mine scenic overlook was closed.

Even so we were able to see a lot of the HUGE mining pit and the giant piles of earth which had been removed from that pit. We explored a couple of company towns which we assumed were occupied by those who work in the various copper operations.

I have seen copper pit mining type operations before. One near Ely, Nevada comes to mind. It was also HUGE, with big trucks making their way up and down the pit. Because we could not get to the overlook today we were not able to look into today's pit to see the giant trucks. I remember mining pits in Bisbee, which is also in Arizona. And one in Lead, South Dakota.

But this mining operation today was the biggest I have ever eye witnessed.

We are planning on returning to the Superior area to hike to some caves where we get to dig for Apache Tears, hoping to find one bigger than the world's biggest, currently in the World's Smallest Museum...