Two rescued after falling into abandoned mine shaft near Quartzsite

Two people were rescued after falling into an abandoned mine shaft near Quartzsite on Thursday afternoon, and one of them dropped about 100 feet back into the mine before falling another 35 feet, according to the La Paz County Sheriff’s Department.

The victims were not identified, and no details were released about why they were near the shaft. What was clear was the danger: once someone goes down in an old mine opening, rescuers are forced to work against darkness, unstable ground and the risk of further collapse while trying to reach the person safely.

The La Paz County Sheriff’s Office says its Search and Rescue Team is made up of sheriff’s office personnel and trained citizen volunteers. The team is primarily used for lost or missing persons, but it can also assist other counties during large-scale or long-duration searches. In a county that stretches across rugged desert and remote travel corridors, that kind of capability is critical.

La Paz Unified Fire-Medical District covers about 1,200 square miles of southern La Paz County, including Quartzsite, Interstate 10 and Highway 95. That geography helps explain why a mine-shaft rescue in this part of the county can become a major operation even when the incident starts with just two people on the surface.

Arizona law requires dangerous abandoned or inactive mine openings to be secured after notice from the state mine inspector, and tampering with warning signs or protections around a shaft, portal or excavation is a class 6 felony. The legal framework reflects the scale of the hazard: the Bureau of Land Management says Arizona has hundreds of thousands of abandoned mine features, with more than 13,000 documented in its cleanup database.

The risk is rooted in Arizona’s long mining history, which the Bureau of Land Management traces back to the 1860s, while Arizona State Mine Inspector materials say the earliest signs of mining in the state may date to around 1000 BC. The danger has surfaced before near La Paz County. In September 2007, two girls, ages 13 and 10, fell into a 125-foot abandoned shaft near Chloride. In April 2020, another Quartzsite-area rescue involved two men, one in his 70s, after a fall of about 35 feet, with a Department of Public Safety confined-space expert helping in the rescue.

In western Arizona, old shafts can look harmless from the surface until the ground gives way. Thursday’s rescue was another reminder that abandoned mine openings remain live hazards in Quartzsite country, where the nearest help may have to travel miles of desert before the real work begins.