The Elizabeth pocket was already an old name when Randy Salars went to the Azure turquoise mine with his father in the 1970s. The pocket had helped make the Burro Mountains famous among gem miners and cutters nearly eighty years earlier. By Randy’s time, the surrounding Tyrone copper operation was becoming the dominant fact of the landscape. Yet for about a month, according to Randy’s family account, a Phelps Dodge mine manager approved a lease that let a small crew return to the old turquoise ground. Randy worked there with his father, Calvin Salars, and Ken and Kenny Kostenbader. Their brief visit connects the era of hand-sorted blue stone to the era of giant copper pits in a way a production chart cannot.
To understand what those four men walked into, begin before the company’s name, before the nineteenth-century claim, and before the celebrated pocket itself. Indigenous miners had already recognized turquoise in these hills. Later prospectors followed old workings, named new claims, and supplied a national gem trade. The Azure mine became the most celebrated of the district’s turquoise properties. Its geology explains both the extraordinary concentration at Elizabeth and why a small crew could still have reason to examine the old working decades after the main commercial rush. This is the story of that layered place, using geological accounts for the earlier mine and Randy’s firsthand family account for the 1970s lease.
Before the famous pocket
The first chapter belongs to Indigenous miners, not to the companies that later put turquoise into gem catalogs. The New Mexico Bureau of Geology’s turquoise review describes ancient workings and stone tools in the Burro Mountains. Its statewide overview places turquoise production and exchange in a much older Southwestern history. A Bureau account of Tyrone says Native people mined turquoise around the area by about 600 CE. These are different levels of precision from different syntheses; neither means that a specific family, community, or year can be attached to every old pit at Azure. The material had cultural, aesthetic, and economic importance long before European-American claim records existed.
The nineteenth-century rediscovery story often names John E. Coleman, who reportedly found turquoise near older workings in 1875. The Bureau’s review prints that year with a question mark in the scanned text, a reminder that early chronology is imperfect. Gillerman’s 1964 survey identifies the Parker mine, southeast of Azure, with Coleman’s find at earlier pits. The naming convention “discovery” in nineteenth-century mining writing usually means discovery for a new claim economy; it should not erase the people whose excavations were already visible on the ground. The old pits helped lead outsiders to the mineral.
By the 1890s, Azure, Parker, and Porterfield were among the principal turquoise properties. The New Mexico Mineral Symposium account gives 1891 for the opening of Azure and describes it as one of the country’s largest turquoise mines. Gillerman describes substantial work near Tyrone between 1890 and 1910 and names Azure as the major producer. These dates belong to the large commercial phase; they do not imply that no one ever handled turquoise in the district afterward. Production summaries are especially likely to miss short, small leases.
What turquoise was doing in this rock
Turquoise is not a blue paint applied to a mountain. It forms through chemical alteration where copper-bearing water interacts with suitable minerals under the right near-surface conditions. The Bureau’s review places Burro Mountains turquoise in fractures and nodules within altered granite and quartz-monzonite porphyry. It describes kaolinite, sericite, and secondary silica in the host. An older Bureau bulletin on nonmetallic minerals, drawing on Zalinski’s Azure observations, distinguishes vein material filling cracks from nuggets or concretions embedded in kaolin. This is why a small pocket could be astonishingly rich while nearby rock was not. The mineral followed pathways and altered zones, not a uniform blanket.
The turquoise varied from blue through green, and its matrix mattered to cutters as well as geologists. The old bulletin notes that material at deeper levels could be associated with malachite and chrysocolla, while the finest turquoise appeared relatively near the surface. Color alone cannot securely identify a piece as Azure or date its extraction; similar colors and patterns occur at more than one mine. Provenance needs a chain of records, a reliable old label, or credible family custody. A stone sold today as “Tyrone” is not automatically from the Elizabeth pocket, and a historic label saying “Azure” may still lack a particular level or working. The rock’s beauty can be real without turning every marketplace claim into a documented mine location.
Azure was part of a group of deposits rather than a solitary hole. Gillerman places the Parker mine roughly 2,000 feet southeast of Azure, the New Azure workings east of the main Azure, and Porterfield to the south. His field description also warns that a USGS topographic sheet mistakenly marked old copper shafts as the turquoise mine slightly southwest of the actual Azure location. That correction matters whenever a modern digital map repeats an inherited label. A pin on a screen may be copied from an older map, not surveyed from the original turquoise working. The names in this article establish relationships within the district; they are not a route into operating mine land.
The Elizabeth pocket
The exceptional Elizabeth pocket was opened in 1893, according to a later New Mexico Mineral Symposium review. Its reported dimensions vary slightly across descriptions, but the shape is clear. The Bureau’s 1979 turquoise review gives about 150 feet along the vein, up to 40 feet across, and 40 to 60 feet vertically. The older Bureau bulletin says the pocket reached from Azure’s second level to the surface, with fine material continuing along the vein. These are dimensions of a historically described mineralized zone, not a modern reserve estimate or a diagram safe to follow underground.
Imagine the mine as the workers would have understood it: several levels exploring a fractured zone, broken rock and clay to sort, and a section where the amount and quality of blue stone changed the operation’s fortunes. The 1979 review describes four adit levels and a large old open excavation extending from the second level to the surface. The best gem material was found within about 100 feet of the surface. A pocket that large would not be a neat cavity full of finished gems. Workers had to extract, sort, clean, and judge material within altered rock. A vivid account need not invent a dramatic moment of discovery or a named miner’s thoughts. The published geometry and the work it implies are compelling enough.
The pocket’s reputation was powerful. Gillerman called the turquoise excellent and said it compared favorably with the finest Persian material in the gem trade of his day. The 1979 Bureau review gave historical Azure production estimates of $2 million to $4 million and a district estimate up to $5 million, while recognizing that estimates vary. Those are period-dollar historical estimates, not current prices or an audited ledger for the Elizabeth pocket alone. Mineral writing often repeats the claim that the pocket yielded more high-grade turquoise than any single deposit then recorded. The important factual core is that contemporary and later geological writers considered it exceptionally large and fine. The superlative depends on what deposits and records were known when the comparison was made.
The pocket’s name has survived because it gives the broad word “Azure” a specific place in the mine’s history. Yet the place should not be reduced to a coordinate. A map can show approximate district relationships, but several generations of excavation and the expansion of copper operations have changed the surface. The old mine descriptions themselves include a mapping error. A more precise modern point should be published only when supported by an appropriately sourced survey and when it does not encourage entry into a restricted industrial site. What matters for the story is the connection: Elizabeth was a remarkable zone within the Azure turquoise mine in the Tyrone area of the Burro Mountains.
One month at the old pocket
By the 1970s, a visitor approaching Tyrone would have encountered a copper-mining district, not a turquoise camp preserved in its 1890s form. The open pit had begun to alter roads and ground. The older Azure workings still had a name and a remembered promise: the Elizabeth pocket. Randy Salars says a Phelps Dodge mine manager approved a lease for about a month to work there. Randy was part of the crew with his father Calvin Salars, Ken Kostenbader, and Kenny Kostenbader. This is Randy’s firsthand family account; the named men and the approximate term come from him. The Bureau’s 1979 review describes former turquoise-producing properties in the district as under Phelps Dodge control, placing the remembered approval in the documented ownership setting of the period.
A month is a small span in a mine’s life. It is long enough, though, to move between the different times present at Azure. The old excavation and altered granite belonged to the turquoise operation that had begun in the nineteenth century. The surrounding copper works belonged to the much larger industry then changing the mountain. Randy and the Kostenbaders stood between those histories with permission to work a named pocket that had once supplied some of the district’s finest material. It was neither a new discovery of Elizabeth nor the revival of a great gem boom. It was a limited chance to look for stone in ground that other miners had made famous.
The work itself would have required attention to the host material, not merely to the color blue. As the geological reports describe, turquoise here filled fractures and occurred in altered rock and clay. A miner trying to recover useful pieces had to separate hard stone from broken matrix and judge whether material would survive cutting. The reports do not describe this family’s day-by-day methods, so the scene should remain at that level: four named people, an approved month-long lease, the historic pocket, and the mineral setting they faced. Those facts carry more weight than invented dialogue or an imagined spectacular find.
The limited permission also says something about mining culture at Tyrone. The old turquoise workings were not simply abandoned places anyone could enter. A copper company controlled the property, and a mine manager’s approval opened a short working window for a family crew. The distinction matters today because old mining names are often repeated as if they were public collecting spots. Randy’s account describes lawful access granted at a particular time; it does not make the ground open now. The mine and the landscape continued to change after that month.
Randy recalls that the working they visited is now covered by the Tyrone pit. The Bureau’s Tyrone overview documents the growth of the open-pit copper operation, while the older Azure descriptions preserve the turquoise geography. Taken together, the sources show why physical traces of earlier work can vanish beneath an active mine. The precise overlap of the family working and the present pit is retained as Randy’s recollection. It is part of the local history of a landscape that has been repeatedly excavated for different minerals.
When copper became the dominant landscape
The Tyrone district’s copper story began before the modern pit. The Bureau’s site history describes underground mining by the early 1860s and the switch to open-pit stripping in the late 1960s. The precise start year appears as 1967 in one Bureau symposium abstract and 1968 in the current tour page, likely reflecting different milestones of opening and production. The essential transition is clear. Turquoise had made the area famous to gem collectors, but copper reshaped the terrain through far larger earthmoving.
The two mineral histories are related geologically, though they should not be conflated economically. Copper-bearing solutions and alteration helped make turquoise possible in fractured near-surface rock. The copper ore body was pursued with a completely different scale of equipment, capital, and processing. A gem pocket of exceptional value could still be tiny beside a porphyry copper system. When the copper mine expanded, old shafts, pits, roads, and markers could be removed, buried, or made inaccessible. A site disappearing beneath modern mining does not erase its history; it makes the old reports, photographs, and family memories more important and requires more care in reading them.
A separate Tyrone copper chapter follows the ore body, ownership changes, and modern operation. This turquoise chapter stays with the old gem district and the family’s short return. The distinction prevents a common geographic confusion: an account of turquoise at Azure is not a claim that a visitor can see the Elizabeth pocket from a public copper overlook, or that every piece of turquoise recovered from the modern mine came from Azure. The published record names multiple deposits and several generations of workings.
The mine that a month can reveal
Published mineral histories tend to move from discovery to peak production to decline. Azure resists that tidy ending. The Elizabeth pocket opened in the 1890s and helped build the mine’s reputation. Turquoise output later faded as copper mining grew. Then Randy’s family account places four people at that old pocket for about a month in the 1970s, with the mine manager’s approval. The episode is modest in scale, but it shows that a district can remain alive to local miners after its celebrated commercial chapter closes. A short lease may leave little trace in production tables while remaining important in family memory.
The story also follows a change in how people valued the same ground. Indigenous miners sought turquoise long before modern property records. Nineteenth-century operators sold gem material into a growing trade. Later copper companies looked at a far larger mineral system and reshaped the surface to work it. The family crew briefly returned to the turquoise history inside that copper era. Each generation inherited a place changed by those before it. The rock’s chemistry links the blue gem and the copper district, but the motives, methods, and scale of work differed dramatically.
Randy’s account supplies the names that broad histories omit: Calvin Salars, Ken Kostenbader, Kenny Kostenbader, and Randy Salars. He recalls an approximately month-long lease approved by a Phelps Dodge mine manager and identifies the location as the Elizabeth pocket of Azure. The technical publications establish the older mine’s geology, dimensions, production estimates, and later corporate setting. That division of sources is enough to tell the episode clearly. A surviving lease or company file could add an exact date or property description someday, but the absence of that paper need not push the people out of the narrative.
Think of the old pocket as a place of repeated encounters rather than a single treasure chamber. The nineteenth-century workers opened levels and extracted turquoise from a mineralized zone. Later observers measured the altered rock and wrote the reports on which present histories depend. Randy’s crew returned for a finite working period as an enormous copper operation grew around the old district. Today, readers meet Azure through preserved specimens, maps, geological descriptions, and the family account. None of those is the entire mine. Together they reveal why the small turquoise story matters within the much larger industrial one.
Reading the district without entering it
The Azure site and the Tyrone mine are not casual collecting destinations. The Bureau’s 1979 turquoise review explicitly warned that turquoise deposits were on claims or leaseholds and required the owner’s or lessee’s permission for collecting. Present ownership and operational boundaries require current verification. Even a historic map that marks an old pit cannot grant access. Active mine land, unstable excavations, and protected archaeological sites make unauthorized entry both unsafe and damaging. A family lease in the 1970s demonstrates that permission was part of the story, not something a modern reader can assume still exists.
A reader can still explore the place through documents and public landscape interpretation. The New Mexico Bureau’s Tyrone tour explains the copper geology and changing operation. Its western Grant County mineral survey locates and distinguishes Azure, Parker, New Azure, and Porterfield within the historic district. The turquoise review describes the gem-bearing rock and Elizabeth pocket. A Grant County Burro Mountains guide places this industrial and gem history among surrounding roads and landscapes without suggesting that old workings are open attractions.
Tyrone turquoise is a story about value changing shape. Long before a claim name, people worked the stone. In the 1890s, the Elizabeth pocket gave Azure a reputation that traveled far beyond Grant County. In the 1970s, a month-long lease approved by a Phelps Dodge mine manager brought Randy Salars, his father Calvin, and Ken and Kenny Kostenbader back to that named ground. The expansion of copper mining then changed the visible landscape. The best way to honor those layers is to give each its proper source: archaeological and geological research for the earlier deposit, documented industrial history for the copper transformation, and a clearly attributed family account for the four people at the lease.
The rock that made the name has no need for an invented ending. The Elizabeth pocket was extraordinary enough to fill the old reports; the family month was brief enough to escape most published production histories. Between them lies a human account of return: a father and son, two Kostenbaders, a mine manager’s permission, and an old turquoise working in a district increasingly defined by copper. What remains visible may be paper and memory rather than an open excavation, but those records still let the different eras speak to one another.
Sources and account notes
- Elliot Gillerman, Mineral Deposits of Western Grant County, 1964, describes the Azure, Parker, New Azure, and Porterfield workings and the reputation of the Elizabeth pocket.
- Robert H. Weber, “Turquoise in New Mexico”, New Mexico Geology, 1979, describes the Burro Mountains geology, old workings, Elizabeth pocket dimensions, production estimates, and property control at publication.
- New Mexico Bureau of Mines, The Non-Metallic Mineral Resources of New Mexico, records the older Azure mine and pocket descriptions attributed to Zalinski.
- New Mexico Bureau of Geology, Tyrone mine tour and 1986 mineral symposium abstract, provide the copper transition and mineral context.
- Randy Salars supplied the firsthand family account of a roughly month-long 1970s lease approved by a Phelps Dodge mine manager, the four names, the Elizabeth pocket location, and his recollection that the working is now covered by the pit.