What is the Dixie Mine?
The Dixie Mine was a poor copper mine. It turned out to be a good bat roost, and the bats are why it matters now.
The mine sits near the southwest corner of McDowell Mountain Regional Park, Maricopa County’s park on the Fountain Hills side of the McDowells, just across the line from Scottsdale’s McDowell Sonoran Preserve. The county says it started as the Red Mountain Mine, “a small start as a copper mine” that “never grew large enough” for the U.S. Bureau of Mines to list it among Arizona’s mining districts. Federal mineral records give the site a run of aliases: Red Mountain, Dixie, Uncle John and Seth Parker. One lists copper and silver as primary commodities, with gold and tin secondary. Another, citing a 1919 mining journal, records 21 claims and underground workings about 187 feet long and 52 feet deep. A federal note that lists the site’s 1977 owners says the Interior Department declared the claims null and void.
What the miners left behind is now a roost. In 2016 the McDowell Sonoran Conservancy’s Field Institute, Northern Arizona University, Arizona State University and the Arizona Game and Fish Department began studying the bats here. They caught pale Townsend’s big-eared bats, cave myotis and canyon bats. With few known roosts for pale Townsend’s in Arizona, the published account calls the site “an extremely important indicator for population stability.”
So the visit has one rule: look, don’t enter. The Dixie Mine Trail leaves a Town of Fountain Hills trailhead and enters the county park, where a fee applies. Walk out, see the workings from the trail, and leave the bats in peace.
How to visit without disturbing anything
Start in the right place. The city’s trail map shows the Dixie Mine Trailhead as a Town of Fountain Hills facility, with the Dixie Mine Trail running into McDowell Mountain Regional Park. The map notes that a fee is required to enter the county park. Check the county’s park page for current hours and how to pay as a walk-in. Farther west, the trail meets Scottsdale’s Prospector Trail at the Preserve boundary, which is how Thompson Peak hikers use it as a back door (see Thompson Peak).
Daylight, cool season, out before dusk. The bats leave the mine around sunset, and that’s exactly when researchers did their counting. They started half an hour before sunset and went on for two hours after. Your visit should be over well before then. A crowd at the entrance at dusk, with phone lights and conversation, is the kind of disturbance a roost doesn’t recover from easily. Hike it in the morning, November through March, and you’ll have a better walk anyway.
Do not enter. Do not shine lights in. It doesn’t matter whether there’s a gate on the day you visit. Old adits collapse, and their air can be bad. More important here, the workings are an occupied roost. Don’t go in, don’t point flashlights or camera flashes into the opening, don’t fly drones at it, and don’t throw anything in. The researchers swabbed bats for the fungus that causes white-nose syndrome. Keeping people out of roosts is part of keeping that out.
Obey whatever the county has posted. We’re not printing current closure details because they’re the county’s to set and can change. If there’s a sign, a gate, a fence or a seasonal closure, it’s there for the bats or for you. Respect it, and ask park staff if you’re unsure.
Read the country instead. The Arizona Geological Survey’s 2018 map of the range shows metarhyolite exposed in the Dixie Mine area: ancient volcanic rock, later cooked and squeezed into something harder. Our geology field guide has the longer story.
Learn the bats, legally. The Conservancy’s field science program is the best way to learn more. Its Preserve-wide monitoring has recorded thirteen bat species, according to the city’s 2024 ecological plan. See our note on the Preserve’s wildlife corridors and field science.
A mine that never was much
The east side of the McDowells drew prospectors for the same reason every Arizona range did, and rewarded them about as well as most. The county’s master plan for McDowell Mountain Regional Park puts it plainly: the range “lured prospectors in search of mineral wealth, but did not produce anything of significance.” When the county surveyed the park’s history in 1963 and wrote its first master plan in 1967, it found “no historical records” for the Dixie Mine in the Bureau of Mines’ archives of Arizona mining districts. It’s one of those places everyone knows by name and nobody wrote down.
The federal mineral database fills in some of the gaps. Its Red Mountain Mine record, compiled by the USGS from an old Bureau of Mines card file and a 1919 article in the Arizona Mining Journal, describes a small copper deposit (bornite and chalcopyrite in diabase and schist) in the McDowell Mountains district. It lists underground workings 57 meters long and about 16 meters deep, roughly 187 by 52 feet, and the note “21 CLAIMS.” A second record, from the Bureau of Mines’ availability system, calls the site Red Mountain, gives the alternate names Dixie, Uncle John and Seth Parker, and lists copper and silver as primary commodities, with gold and tin secondary. It also records 1977 owners, N. McCollough, H. Gillespie and R. Gillespie, and a one-line epitaph: “US Dept. of Interior declared claims null & void.” The likely paper behind that line is a 1976 BLM validity examination of mining claims in the Dixie Mining District, cited in the city’s 2015 cultural resource plan. A third record, a “Dixie Copper Mine” from a 1942 wartime mineral report, sits a little to the northeast under a different district name. Whether it’s the same workings, a neighbor or a mislocated duplicate, the records don’t settle.
You will also find accounts online that credit a Red Mountain Consolidated Copper Mines company in the early 1900s and describe the mine as handed to the park system in 1977. We haven’t found a primary source for the company. The federal records we checked show the claims declared void, not a transfer. Hiking write-ups also repeat a founding date, tunnel lengths and claim years we couldn’t confirm, so we’ve left them out. The documents that would settle it are the BLM’s 1976 validity exam and the old state mining-department files on the Dixie, both held in the Arizona Geological Survey’s online mine files, which were offline when we checked.
The ranchers had claims too. The county’s plan says the neighboring P-Bar Ranch, bought in 1935 by Lee Barkdoll and Delsie Journigan, held “nearly a dozen mining claims in the Dixie Mining District” alongside 25,000 acres and 165 head of cattle. In the desert, a mining claim was often as much a way of holding ground as a plan to dig.
The roost
The mine’s second life began with scientists, not prospectors. Bat studies at the Dixie in the 1990s left baseline data, and in 2016 the Conservancy’s Field Institute came back with partners from NAU, ASU and Arizona Game and Fish to study bat diversity and habitat use around the mine. “The importance of this roosting site cannot be understated,” ASU’s Marianne Moore said in the Conservancy’s account. “There are very few easily accessible sites in Arizona where numerous bats can be monitored.”
The methods show how careful the work was. Observers with night-vision gear and infrared lights sat quietly at the entrance and counted bats leaving. In 2017 an infrared video camera replaced the human observers “to minimize disruptions.” An ultrasonic detector logged echolocation calls from a quiet spot nearby. A harp trap, which the account calls the gentlest bat trap known, caught bats at the entrance so they could be identified, measured and released. Swabs tested for the fungus behind white-nose syndrome. Three species turned up in the traps: the pale Townsend’s big-eared bat (Corynorhinus townsendii pallescens), the cave myotis (Myotis velifer) and the canyon bat (Parastrellus hesperus). Repeated exit counts suggested a viable roost. The open questions in 2017 were basic and important: which species use the mine, and as what kind of roost? The stated goal was a bat monitoring and management plan for the McDowells.
The county’s own plan counts at least eleven bat species in the park and lists the pale Townsend’s big-eared bat among its special-status species. On the Scottsdale side, the city’s 2024 ecological plan reports thirteen bat species recorded by the Conservancy’s monitoring and says a Townsend’s big-eared bat maternity roost has been found in the Preserve. The plan doesn’t say where, and neither will we. Don’t assume it’s this one.
Why it matters
Most abandoned mines in Arizona are holes worth fencing off. This one became a research site, a place where a rare Arizona bat can be counted without anyone going underground. That’s the case for the most boring possible visit: walk out in daylight, look at the entrance from the trail, think about the miners who thought copper was the point, and leave before the real residents come out at dusk.