Fodor's Expert Review Lavender Pit Mine

About ¼ mile after AZ 80 intersects with AZ 92, you can pull off the highway into a gravel parking lot for a view of the Lavender Pit Mine, a huge hole left by the copper miners. Though the piles of "tailings," or waste, are lavender-hued, the pit's namesake is actually Harrison (Harry) Lavender, the engineer largely responsible for transforming Bisbee's rock into commercial copper ore. Arizona's largest pit mine yielded some 94 million tons of ore before mining activity came to a halt.