Muñoz didnât see a ghost that night, but he has since become well acquainted with others in town. There is the Mexican bakery, which used to sell pink cookies but now opens only when the late ownerâs granddaughter feels up to it. Thereâs the old Magma Club, its once-segregated swimming pool â available one day a week to Hispanics â long since filled in. Muñoz can still point out where all the former bars were on Main Street, the ones that drew crowds of carousing miners in the good years before copper prices plunged in 1981 and Magma boarded up and left town. Now their dusty windows are what give out-of-towners from nearby Phoenix reason to write off Superior as âdead.â
âWhat happens when a mine closes, the hardship that brings to people â todayâs generation has never experienced that,â Muñoz told me.
Superior is home to about 2,400 people, less than half its population when the mine was booming. To tourists zipping past on U.S. 60 to visit the Wild West sites in the Superstition Mountains, it might look half a step away from becoming a ghost town, itself. As recently as 2018, pictures of Main Street were used as stock photos to illustrate things like âAmericaâs worsening geographic inequality.â
But if you take the exit into town, itâs clear something in Superior is changing. The once-haunted boarding house has undergone a multi-million-dollar renovation into a boutique hotel, charging staycationers that make the hour drive south from Scottsdale $200 a night. Across the street, Bellas Cafe whips up terrific sandwiches in a gleaming, retro-chic kitchen. The Chamber of Commerce building, a little further down the block, has been painted an inviting shade of purple. And propped in the window of some of the storefronts with their lights on, you might even see a sign: WE SUPPORT RESOLUTION COPPER.
Resolution Copperâs offices are located in the former Magma Hospital, where Muñoz was born and where his mother died. People in hard hats and safety vests mill about the parking lot, miners without a mine, which is not an unusual sight in Superior these days â no copper has been sold out of the immediate area in over two decades. And yet just a nine-minute drive further up the hill and another 15-minute elevator ride down the deepest mine shaft in the country lies one of the worldâs largest remaining copper deposits. Itâs estimated to be 40 billion pounds, enough to meet a quarter of U.S. demand, according to the companyâs analysis.
Thatâs âhuge,â Adam Simon, an Earth and environmental sciences professor at the University of Michigan, told me, and not just in terms of sheer size.
âCopper is the most important metal for all technologies we think of as part of the energy transition: battery electric vehicles, grid-scale battery storage, wind turbines, solar panels,â Simon said. In May, he published a study with Lawrence Cathles, an Earth and atmospheric sciences researcher at Cornell University, which looked at 120 years of copper-mining data and found that just to meet the demands of âbusiness as usual,â the world will need 115% more of the material between 2018 and 2050 than has been previously mined in all of human history, even with recycling rates taken into account.
Aluminum, used in high-voltage lines, is sometimes floated as a potential substitute, but itâs not as good of a conductor, and copper is almost always the preferred metal in batteries and electricity generation. Renewables are particularly copper-intensive; one offshore wind turbine can require up to 29 tons. What lies in the hills behind Superior, then, represents âmillions of electric vehicles, millions of wind turbines, millions of solar panels. And itâs also lots of jobs, from top to bottom â jobs for people with bachelorâs degrees in engineering, mining, geology, and environmental science, all the way down to security officers and truck drivers,â Simon said. He added: âThe world will need more copper year over year for both socioeconomic improvement in the Global South and also the energy transition, and neither of those can happen without increasing the amount of copper that we produce.â
Muñoz insisted to me that the promises of jobs and a robust local economy are a kind of Trojan horse. âEverybodyâs getting drunk and having a good time: âOh, look at the gift they brought us!ââ he said of Superiorâs support for Resolution Copper. âBut at night, theyâre going to sneak out of that horse, and theyâre going to leave an environmental disaster.â
For now, though, the copper has just one catch: Resolution isnât allowed to touch it.
If not for a painted sign declaring the ground HOLY LAND, there would be nothing visible to suggest the 16 oak-shaded tent sites over Resolution Copperâs ore body were anything particularly special. The Oak Flat campground is less than five miles past Superior, but at an elevation of nearly 4,000 feet, it can feel almost 10 degrees Fahrenheit cooler. On the late June day that I visited with Muñoz, Sylvia Delgado, and Orlando âMarroâ Perea â the leaders of the Concerned Citizens and Retired Miners Coalition â the floor of the East Valley was 113 degrees Fahrenheit, and the altitude offered only limited relief.
Directly below us and to the east of the campground, beneath a bouldery, yucca-studded desert, lies the copper deposit. At 7,000 or so feet deep, extracting it would require an advanced mining process called block caving, in which ore is collected from below through what is essentially a controlled cave-in, like sand slipping through the neck of an hourglass.
Muñoz, a fifth-generation miner, prefers the metaphor of going to the dentist. âThey drill out your tooth and refill it: thatâs basically traditional cut-and-fill mining,â he told me. âBlock cave, on the other hand, would be going to the dentist and having them pull out the whole molar. It just leaves a vacant hole.â In this case, the resulting cavity would be almost two miles wide and over 1,000 feet deep by the time the ore was exhausted sometime in the 2060s.
Even four decades is just a blink of an eye for Oak Flat, though, where human history goes back at least 1,500years; anthropologists say the mineâs sinkhole would swallow countless Indigenous burial locations and archeological sites, including petroglyphs depicting antlered animals that Muñoz and Perea showed me hidden deep in the rocks. Even more alarmingly, the subsidence would obliterate ChĂ'chil BiĆdagoteel, the Western Apacheâs name for the lands around Oak Flat, which are sacred to at least 10 federally recognized tribes. The members of the San Carlos Apache who are leading the opposition effort, and use the location for a four-day-long girlhood coming-of-age ceremony, say it is the only place where their prayers can reach the Creator directly.
Mining and Indigenous sovereignty have been at odds in Arizona for over a century. âThe Apache is as near the lobo, or wolf of the country, as any human being can be to a beast,â The New York Times wrote in 1859, claiming the tribe was âthe greatest obstacle to the operations of the mining companiesâ in the area. Three years later, the U.S. Armyâs departmental commander ordered Apache men killed âwherever found,â the social archaeologist John Welch writes in his eye-opening historical survey of the region, in which he also advocates for using the term âgenocideâ to describe the governmentâs policies. That violence still casts a shadow in Superior: Apache Leap, an astonishing escarpment that looms over the town and backs up against Oak Flat, is named for a legend that cornered Apache warriors jumped to their deaths from its cliffs rather than surrender to the U.S. Cavalry.
As the Apache were being forced onto reservations and into residential boarding schools during the late 1890s, a treaty with the government set aside Oak Flat for protection. The land was later fortified against mining by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, with the federal protections reconfirmed by the Nixon administration in the 1960s. (The defunct Magma Mine that fueled the first copper boom in Superior is located just off this 760-acre âOak Flat Withdrawal Area.â)
In 1995, the enormity of the Oak Flat ore body â and the billions it would be worth if it could be accessed â started to become apparent. The British and Australian mining companies Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton formed a U.S. subsidiary, Resolution Copper, which bought the old Magma mine and began to lobby Arizona politicians to sign over the neighboring parcel of Oak Flat. Between 2004 and 2013, lawmakers from the state introduced 11 different land transfer bills into Congress, none of which managed to earn broad support.
Then, in December 2014, President Barack Obama signed a must-pass defense spending bill. On page 1,103 was a midnight rider, inserted by Arizona Republican Senators John McCain and Jeff Flake, which authorized a land transfer of 2,400 acres of Tonto National Forest, including Oak Flat, to Resolution Copper in exchange for private land the company had bought in other parts of the state. (Flake previously worked as a paid lobbyist for a Rio Tinto uranium mine, and the company contributed to McCainâs 2014 Senate campaign.)
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The senatorsâ rider also included an odd little twist. While the National Environmental Policy Act requires the Forest Service to conduct an environmental impact statement for a potential mine, the bill stipulated that the land transfer to Resolution Copper had to be completed within a 60-day window of the final environmental impact statementâs release, regardless of what the FEIS found.
After six years of study, the FEIS was rushed to publication by President Donald Trump in the final five days of his term, triggering that 60-day countdown. President Biden rescinded Trumpâs FEIS once he took office in 2021, pending further consultation with the tribes, but the clock will begin anew once a revised FEIS is released, potentially later this year. (The new FEIS was expected last summer, but the Forest Service has since reported there is no timeline for its release. The agency declined to comment to Heatmap for this story, citing ongoing litigation.)
A spokesperson for Resolution Copper told me that the company is âcommitted to being a good steward of the land, air, and water throughout the entirety of this project,â and described programs to restore the local ecology and preserve certain natural features, including Apache Leap. âAt each step,â the spokesperson said, âwe have taken great care to solicit and act upon the input of our Native American and other neighbors. We have made many changes to the project scope to accommodate those concerns and will continue those efforts over the life of the project.â
Meanwhile, Apache Stronghold â the San Carlos Apache-led religious nonprofit opposing the mine â filed a lawsuit to block the land transfer, arguing that the destruction of Oak Flat infringes on their First Amendment right to practice their religion. The lower courts havenât agreed, citing a controversial 1988 decision against tribes who made a similar argument in defense of a sacred grove of trees in California. Apache Stronghold, joined by the religious liberty group Becket, is now asking the U.S. Supreme Court to hear its case, a decision that is expected any day now. Nearly everyone I spoke with for this story, however, was pessimistic that the Justices would agree to hear the battle over Oak Flat, meaning the lower courtâs ruling against Apache Stronghold would stand.
If Mila Besich could have it her way, Biden would visit Superior. Heâd marvel at Apache Leap and Picketpost Mountain, visit the impressive new Superior Enterprise Center â paid for partially with money from his 2021 American Rescue Plan Act â and maybe wrap up the day with a purple scoop of prickly pear ice cream from Feliciaâs Ice Cream Shop. And, most importantly, heâd hear her pitch: that âSuperior and the state of Arizona have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to be the leader in advancing your green energy strategy.â She says Superior â and America â needs this mine.
Superior is a blue town, and Besich, its mayor, is a Democrat, which means she has found herself in the awkward position of defending Resolution Copper against colleagues like Congressman RaĂșl Grijalva of Tucson and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who have introduced unsuccessful bills in Congress to prevent the land transfer. There is something of a bitter irony, too, in seeing her party tout the economic upsides of the energy transition while standing in the way of Superiorâs mine, which would employ an average of 1,434 workers per year and add over $1 billion annually to Arizonaâs economy during its lifespan, according to the FEIS.
âEvery mayor wants more jobs in their community,â Besich told me simply. But, she also pointed out, âCopper is critical to the green economy, so if we want the green economy, we should want to be mining American copper.â
Superior, of course, isnât just any town. âEverybody here either worked in the mines or had family that worked in the mines,â James Schenck, a former employee of Resolution Copper who supports the mine and serves as the treasurer for Rebuild Superior, a nonprofit working to diversify the local economy, told me. âThey understand the downsides, and some of them, for a while, were having a hard time understanding how this is different than what went on before.â
Though everyone seems to be on cordial terms â at one point during my visit, I was having lunch with Muñoz and Delgado when Besich walked in, and everyone smiled politely at one another â there are still clear factions. A Facebook group for locals warns against âposts concerning DRAMA, POLITICS, RELIGION, and MINING,â presumably the same topics to be avoided at family Thanksgivings.
The critical mineral experts I talked to for this story, though, said Schenck is largely right on that point. âMining in 2024 is radically different than mining in 1954 or in 1904,â Simon told me. âIt is really surgical.â
Muñoz is one of those in town who still isnât buying it, and has converted his garage into an interpretive center for exposing the perceived infiltrators. As soft classic rock played over the speakers and a fan whirred to keep us cool, he showed me the 3D model he had commissioned of the Oak Flat sinkhole, with a miniature Eiffel Tower subsumed in its crater for scale. Laid out on a table on the other side of the room was a row of six dictionary-thick, spiral-bound sections of the FEIS, their most pertinent sections bookmarked. On the walls, Muñoz had hung pictures of comparable tailings sites in other parts of the world â cautionary tales of the hazards posed during the long lifespan of mines. (Including the water demands, no small concern in a place like Arizona, which opens a whole other can of worms).
âI use my experience to educate the people,â Muñoz said. âThis isnât what itâs made out to be. Theyâre going to play you.â
Muñoz was employed at the Magma Copper mine until 1982, when he was 27. âOne day they said, âWeâre shutting down.â They folded up just like a carnival does on Monday morning,â he recalled. The abrupt departure devastated Superior: In These Timesdescribed the following years as an âeconomic cataclysmâ for the town. By 1989, the median household income was just $16,118 compared to $36,806 in Queen Creek, the nearest Phoenix suburb just a 45-minute drive away.
âI witnessed grown men cry,â Muñoz said. âMen whoâd been in the mines pretty close to 30 years â they never knew nothing else.â His father, the former boarding house owner, was among them: âHe had limited writing abilities and what have you. He was 58. People lost their homes here. They lost their cars. There were divorces. Some people committed suicide. The drinking, the drugs. It was a bad time.â
Muñoz went on food stamps and unemployment. âThis generation that is coming up, theyâve never experienced that,â he said. âTheyâve never experienced a repossession note in the mail from the bank. Theyâve never experienced a disconnection notice hanging from your front door knob. And theyâve never experienced calling up the utilities and saying, âHey, can you wait until Friday when my unemployment check comes in?ââ
Superiorâs story isnât unique; Arizonaâs Copper Triangle is a constellation of hollowed-out company towns. Like many other out-of-work Magma miners, Muñoz eventually found a job at San Manuel, a BHP-owned block cave mine about an hour south of Superior. Then, in 1999, copper prices stuttered again, and by 2003, it shut down, too.
Muñoz had just returned from a car show in San Manuel when we met in his garage, and he reported it was still a sorry sight. âThe main grocery store is closed, the Subway, all the buildings are boarded up, and the schools are shut down,â he said. The mine âjust abandoned that town.â
Even as Muñoz and the Concerned Citizens and Retired Miners Coalition work with Apache Stronghold and national environmentalist groups like HECHO, the Sierra Club, and the National Wildlife Federation try to block Resolution Copperâs mine, there is a distinct feeling in Superior of its inevitability. Schenck, the treasurer for Rebuild Superior, told me he suspects just â10% or 15%â of people in town are âagainst the project.â
âMy personal belief is this copper deposit is going to be developed at some point,â Schenck said. âItâs too important.â
Besich, the mayor, gave this impression too. âWhat people need to understand is, this ore body is not going anywhere,â she said. âSomeone will mine it in the future.â She views Superior and the copper industry as partners in an âarranged marriage,â and her job as mayor is helping them âfigure out how to get along.â
From the outside, though, Resolution Copper looks more like a sugar daddy. To date, Rio Tinto and BHP have spent more than $2 billion combined pursuing the Oak Flat mine, including pumping money into the Chamber of Commerce building, the Enterprise Center, and the fire department. When the town of Kearny, downstream of the mineâs proposed tailings site, needed a new ambulance, Resolution Copper offered to help foot the bill. Local high schoolers and tribal members can even apply for Resolution Copper scholarships.
Critics say Resolution Copper is buying political and social influence in the Copper Corridor, a modern-day iteration of the propaganda tactics that swept aside the Apache in the late 1800s. Rio Tinto and BHP âremain committed to influencing U.S. government decisions about the use of public lands and minerals, regardless of additional harms to those lands, to Native Americans, or to National Register historic sites and sacred places,â the archaeologist Welch wrote in his Oak Flat study.
Rio Tinto is infamous even in the mining industry for its poor history of handling community- and heritage-related concerns. To pick a recent example, the company drew international condemnation for its 2020 destruction of the Juukan Gorge cave in Western Australia, a sacred site to the Aboriginal people that had evidence of continuous human occupation going back to the Ice Age. Though Rio Tinto had the legal right to destroy the 45,000-year-old caves, âit is hard to believe community engagement is being taken seriouslyâ by the company, Glynn Cochrane, a former Rio Tinto senior advisor, said in a testimony in the aftermath. Archaeologists and sympathetic politicians have warned that the cultural and spiritual loss caused by mining Oak Flat would be like a second Juukan Gorge.
The San Carlos Apache are not a monolith, however, and the community has differing beliefs about the cultural importance of Oak Flat. Tribal members who support the mine or work for Resolution Copper are often cited by non-Native supporters as proof of Apache Strongholdâs supposedly arbitrary defense of Oak Flat. (Apache Stronghold, which is on a prayer journey to petition the Supreme Court, did not return Heatmapâs request for comment.)
Muñoz and his team are specifically worried about how Superior, the town, will make out. U.S. copper smelters are already at capacity, meaning Resolution Copper would likely send much if not all of the raw copper extracted at Oak Flat to China for processing. (Rio Tintoâs largest shareholder is the Aluminum Corporation of China.) The spokesperson for Resolution Copper told me that itâs the companyâs priority to process the ore domestically, and Rio Tinto does have its own facility in the U.S., the Kennecott copper smelting facility in Utah. Yet it hasnât committed publicly to processing the Arizona ore there, and itâs far from clear that it even has the capacity to do so.
For Simon, the University of Michigan professor, that shouldnât be a deterrent: âIf we mine more copper here and it just means we have to export it â who cares?â he pushed back. âIf it has to go to China and they smelt it, then you send it to China and they smelt it. Climate is the prize, and if we want to mitigate our impact, weâve got to do it. There are no ifs, ands, or buts.â
Oak Flat is also located outside of Superiorâs town limits, meaning the community would only recoup about $500,000 in tax revenue, on the high end, from the mine annually, according to the 2021 FEIS â Schenek told me the townâs budget is around $3 million, so itâs hardly insignificant, though it is peanuts compared to the $38 million the state would reap. The FEIS additionally estimated that only about a quarter of the mineâs eventual employees would actually âseek to live in or near Superior;â many would choose instead to commute the hour or so from Phoenixâs Maricopa County.
Because of technological advances in mining and robotics, the mine also wonât bring back the physical jobs locals remember from the 1970s â by Resolution Copperâs own admission. Besich, at least, isnât bothered by this detail: âIn all reality, I donât see my children and their peers wanting to do the manual physical labor that my grandfather, my father, and certainly my great-grandfather did,â she told me. âSo the change in technique is good, and I think that itâs actually better for the environment in the long term.â She added that Resolution Copperâs investment in things like local infrastructure and worker training programs will compensate for the comparably insignificant tax revenue the town will otherwise receive, ensuring Superior gets a fair cut of the bonanza.
What supporters and opponents of the mine can agree on is that Superior must avoid the devastation of the 1980s if or when the Oak Flat mine is exhausted in 40 or more years. Besich and Schenck told me their vision is for Superior to be a town with a mine, not a mining town. But is such a thing even possible? In recent years, Superior has tried to position itself as an outdoor recreation gateway to the many climbing routes and hiking trails in the area. Yet I struggle to imagine anyone would want to vacation or recreate so close to a massive mining operation.
Muñoz believes Superior should throw itself entirely into tourism, which brings in three times as much revenue as the copper industry in Arizona. He dismissed arguments that losing the mine this far into negotiations and preparations would set the town back two decades, telling me about a conversation he had with Vicky Peacey, the president of Resolution Copper. âShe said, âHow do I tell my 300-plus employees that they donât have a job?ââ he recalled. âI said, âThe same way BHP told the 3,300 in San Manuel they didnât have a job. Magma Copper didnât have a problem telling us we didnât have a job in â82.â
Whatever gets decided about Oak Flat will reverberate far beyond Superior, though. âWeâve got to keep our eyes on the prize,â Simon told me. âAnd if the prize is mitigating human impacts on climate, and that requires the energy transition, and that requires copper, and we have a potential mine in Arizona that would provide 500,000 tons of copper every year for decades â we need to do that.â
At the end of my day in Superior, I went with Muñoz and Delgado, another former miner, to visit the haunted boarding house.
The renovated interior was surprisingly beautiful, decorated with period-appropriate details like iron bed frames, clawfoot bathtubs, and lace curtains that softened the harshness of the mid-afternoon light. Though even the FEIS warns that âmining in Arizona has followed a âboom and bustâ cycle, which potentially leads to great economic uncertainty,â it was with a pang that I imagined the building one day falling back into disrepair. It, and the town, had survived too much.
After peeking into Room 103, where Muñoz had passed his tipsy night all those decades ago, we asked the friendly woman working the front desk if sheâd had any supernatural experiences herself â surely sheâd seen the mattress-flipping phantom, or swinging chandeliers, or perhaps a white-boot miner whoâd come down from the hills?
To our disappointment, she shook her head. For now, whatever ghosts there once might have been in Superior had gone.
Editorâs note: This story has been updated to include comment from Resolution Copper.
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