The town is notable for several things: sitting in a steep valley at about 5,000 feet, it’s especially picturesque. Depending on where we were standing, the small, colorful houses rising up both sides of the canyon reminded us of either Santa Cruz, Ashland, or the town in the Popeye movie.
As a tourist destination, it seems to offer a higher quality of everything normally found in places like this. The restaurants are excellent, galleries offer art of a much higher quality (and price) than usually found in your typical tourist trap, and among the usual antique and curio shops, there are the occasional specialty stores you would expect to find in a large city. I went into Optimo Milliners, for example, to see if I could get my felt fedora cleaned and blocked. The guy was nice about it, but my hat is a piece of crap and I could buy two for what it would cost to have him do triage on it. And there’s a four-month waiting list. So I thought, well maybe I’ll just buy one of his fancy-ass hats, but that would be an even longer wait, during which I could work part time to come up with a down payment. He seems to have a worldwide reputation, and for all I know he makes the Pope's hats, though he specializes in Panamas.
But come to Bisbee for the mine tour, an absolutely fascinating hour and a half underground in a miners’ train. We went down 1,770 feet in a mine that went down8,000 feet underground and has an amazing 2,000 miles of tunnels. Or so the guide said, a former miner with a terrific dry sense of humor and a bucketful of facts, some of which I took with a grain of salt, even though The Copper Queen was not a salt mine.
The day shift reports for work
By about 1955, they figured out it was cheaper and easier just to eat the mountain and sort out the rocks later, so there’s one spectacular hole in the ground. When the mine reached the edge of the next town over, it just kept going. Don’t follow your GPS to any addresses in Warren.
This was a little bit of a pilgrimage for Mary since her father was born and raised here. He graduated from Bisbee high in about 1935 when it really was a rough and tumble mining town. We went to the museum and looked through some old records. Mary had thought her grandfather was a mining engineer, but turns out he was “Chief Clerk” for Phelps Dodge. We don’t know quite what that means but it sounds important.
Still, Mary doesn’t appear to be the rightful heir to anything here in Bisbee, so we’re moving on tomorrow, despite the many interesting things to see we never got to.
Maybe next year.
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