bisbee

Greg and I really loved Bisbee. Bisbee has the feel of a small historic mining town in California—touristy on the main street, but you can tell the town has spirit and a great community. The town is full of artists. A curious combination of the normally fairly conservative Arizonians and the liberalness of artists and, well…hippies.

Bisbee was at one time the largest city between St. Louis and San Francisco (according to their tourist brochure). Two surveyors discovered some weird rocks when sitting down for lunch and they turned out to be copper. The town is nestled between 31 underground mines and a huge open pit mine. Tons of copper, gold, silver plus lead and zinc were mined out in the town’s heyday. In the 70’s most of the mines were shut down and all were shut down by 1980 (I need to confirm these dates). Instead of becoming a ghost town like many old mining towns, the town became a perfect destination for hippies looking for cheap accommodations. In moved the hippies and artists. I’m sure this description is on all the tourist brochures.

The town’s main street and surrounding streets are full of working art and jewelry-smithing studios and shops. Just off main is Brewery Gulch, a strip of historic pubs that remind me of the pubs in Juneau, Alaska, full of life and history. The town is built on steep hillsides, the houses perched on terraces and seemingly held up by rock walls. Cute, artistic renovated houses alternate with lots that are decaying and have seen much better days. Many of the houses can not be reached by cars—cars are left parked at the bottom and you walk up the towns many amazing staircases. Even the town‘s courthouse is interesting, complete with art-deco doors and fountain. Greg and I didn’t see many of the standard tourist sites, given our toddler entertainment task, but I did go on the Queen Mine tour.

The Queen Mine tour takes you underground into one of Phelps-Dodge’s old copper mines. You ride on the old mine tracks on a train and one of the guys that actually worked the mine leads the tour and tells you about the operations. The tour was really wonderful—don’t miss it if you go to Bisbee.

As exciting for me was meeting Kate Drew-Wilkenson, a wonderful jewelry designer with a shop in town. Kate loved my bracelets and rings and encouraged me to keep making and designing jewelry. She even took me aside and showed me some jewelry ‘tricks of the trade.’ She also nicely invited us to her house to look at her workshop and pick through her bead collection, but unfortunately we couldn’t work the timing to get there. I have an idea we will be back in Bisbee sometime soon.