Tyrone Mine, New Mexico

A few miles southwest of Silver City, the Continental Divide enters Freeport-McMoRan’s Tyrone Operations. This has been an active open pit copper mine since 1967, one of two in the area (the other is the Chino operation, ten miles east of Silver City). Mining here started a hundred years ago, as an underground operation. The town of Tyrone was built in 1915 by the Phelps Dodge Corporation to house workers for the mine. The town was designed by noted Gothic and Spanish colonial revival architect Bertram Goodhue, and soon became a very grand ghost town, in 1921, when the underground mine closed. The town crumbled romantically until the 1960s, when the mine opened up again as an open pit operation, and the townsite, now in the way, was demolished. Phelps Dodge was acquired by the other big Arizona-based mining company, Freeport-McMoRan, in 2007. Since 1992, copper has been processed by a solution extraction and electrowinning method, generating around 100 million pounds of copper annually. Freeport-McMoRan also owns Climax Molybdenum, which operates two major mines on the Continental Divide in Colorado. The company is thus the single largest sculptor of the landscape along the Divide.