Apache Leap Mining Festival

Besich Park sits at 240 Main Street in Superior, a Pinal County copper town on U.S. Route 60 about an hour east of Phoenix. Above it rises Apache Leap, a cliff that Arizona Highways put in 1990 at 1,800 feet over the town. For three days each March, the park and the street in front of it hold the Apache Leap Mining Festival & Carnival, presented by the Superior Chamber of Commerce. The 2026 festival, the 37th annual, ran March 27 through 29. The 2027 festival is set for March 12, 13 and 14. Admission and the live music are free. The carnival rides and the vendors’ goods cost money.

Friday begins in the afternoon. Food trucks and retail vendors open at 3 p.m. and stay until 11, local restaurants and merchants join in, and DJ Supetown plays until 10. The beer garden, the Blasting Zone Bar, opens at the same hour. It closes from 5:30 to 7 for a private sponsors’ social in the park and reopens to everyone at 7. The festival site points visitors there for the mountain views. For 2027 the site also announces a new carnival coming to town.

Saturday on Main Street

The Main Street Parade starts at 10 a.m. Saturday, and the opening ceremony follows at 11. Then comes the Chihuahua race, open to Chihuahuas and other small dogs, with registration from 10 in Besich Park. The 2027 schedule puts the start at 11:30, while another page of the festival site says 11. From noon, Jump N Slide Party Rentals runs the Kids Zone, with inflatable basketball and football, carnival games, lawn games and mini golf. It stays open until 7 on Saturday and until 5 on Sunday.

The mining competition runs from 1 to 4 p.m., after a 12:30 safety meeting for contestants, and the awards ceremony comes at 5. Power Drive plays Center Stage from 7 until 11. Sunday is shorter. The beer garden pours from 10 to 7, and DJ Supetown plays classic country and oldies of the 1950s and ‘60s, sponsored by BHP.

Spiking, sawing, drilling, mucking

The competition has four events: spiking, hand sawing, jackleg drilling and mucking. Drilling requires prior experience, and mucking is done in pairs. The festival site lists $500 for the winner of each event and $1,500 overall for a contestant who enters all four. In 2019 the Arizona Silver Belt described men and women competing for “the coveted prize of a $3,000 purse.”

The Copper Area News printed the times from 2018, the 30th festival, when hundreds gathered to watch. Chris Liddle won the sawing in 16.22 seconds, with James Verbois second at 16.63. Both, the paper noted, were engineering students at the U of A school of Mining. Carlos Martinez won spiking in 51.37 seconds and drilling in 41.47, finishing ahead of Chris Allison both times, and took the overall title at 162.50 seconds. Adrian Armijo and Abraham Torres won the mucking at 39.34, a tenth of a second ahead of Jesus Gonzalez and AJ Quiroz. Total winnings came to $1,345.

Pink hard hats and the smelter stack

The 2018 theme was “Women in Mining. From Pickaxe to Boardroom.” The top parade prizes went to the Gorham family, celebrating more than 115 years of women in their family working in mining, and to ASARCO, which decorated an ATV as a pink hard hat. The Superior Dance Company’s folklorico dancers placed third. Sydney Hay of AMIGOS was Grand Marshal. Penny, Mocha and Ginger finished first, second and third in the Chihuahua race. On Sunday there was roping for youth and adults, and AJ Quiroz and Olivia Townsend won the adult event. A horseshoe tournament for the Richard Castaneda Memorial Scholarship drew 27 teams, and there were guided hikes. Saturday night ended with the crowd dancing to Powerdrive.

The 31st festival, March 15 to 17, 2019, honored the hard rock miners who worked in the smelter. Superior’s smelter stack had been removed because of its age and condition, and the Silver Belt wrote that it “remains in the hearts of many of the town’s residents.” The Grand Marshals had all worked at the smelter, and Westland Resources presented a show called “History of the Smelter.” Friday night ran under a “Miners Rock … and Roll” theme, with music of the ‘50s and ‘60s by Neto and Imagine.

The Chihuahua race that year ended in a runoff between the fastest small dog and the fastest Chihuahua. Children panned for pennies in the Kid’s Zone, and there was a tug-of-war. Visitors painted stones for Superior Rocks, a project in which small painted rocks are hidden around downtown, found, and hidden again. Author and historian Jack San Felice spoke on the little-known Woodbury Copper Mine near Florence and the Superstition Mountains. Wildman Phil performed with his desert reptiles and picked audience members to help. Saturday’s street dance was to Sol Deville, and Sunday brought mariachis. The Chamber’s invitation that year read: “Discover Superior — a well-kept secret of an amazing little town.”

There was no festival the next year. In March 2020, amid the first coronavirus closures, the Town of Superior canceled it, and the Copper Area News reported the cancellation on March 18.

The name on the cliff

Pinal County’s history of Superior starts its mining chapter in 1875, the year the county was created and the Great Silver King Mine was discovered. That discovery brought thousands of men into the county.

The cliff’s name has two accounts. The county’s history page, citing a 2011 book by C. A. Schumacher and D. M. Tomerlin, says it comes from a battle between Apaches in the mountaintop stronghold and a group of Mexicans, Pimas, Maricopa Indians and a few whites from Florence. Arizona Highways, in February 1990, gave the legend that in the early 1870s as many as 75 Apaches leapt over the edge rather than be killed or captured by soldiers.

The magazine reported that historians had found nothing in U.S. Army records to support the story. It noted that published accounts, based on hearsay, told of bones, beads and arrowheads found down the cliff face after 1900. It judged one version most likely. The Army set up Camp Pinal west of the cliff in 1870 and moved it farther west in 1871 as Camp Picket Post. One night, soldiers circled east of the mountaintop and surprised Apaches camped near the precipice, and a number of them leapt rather than face the troopers’ guns. “Whatever the details,” the magazine wrote, “the story and the name cling to the cliff with a remarkable tenacity.”