Miko and Me: Getting Your Bisbee Funk On

Bisbee Arizona – it is a different town from what I've seen in the rest of Arizona. It sits in the hills, on top of what was vast amounts of copper and other minerals. It was quite the boom town until the mining company decided to shut down the mines in 1976. It was the typical small town story where once the company store shuts down, the town dies. Bisbee rose from the ashes when the hippies arrived. You could buy housing just for the cost of paying back taxes. Once the hippies came, artists followed and then came the tourists. The town is struggling once again because of Covid, but the history has made it an interesting town. Another fun fact, I was told, was that Bisbee is at the same altitude as Denver so it has actual seasons.

I met a woman who decided to move to Bisbee from Vancouver. She had sold her house, put things in storage and drove down in her camper van to Bisbee. She had lived in Bisbee in the seventies (remember the hippie stage?) Those houses that you could buy for the cost of the back taxes were now going for a quarter of a million dollars. I got to virtually house shop with her. I just love house shopping when I don't have to put up the bucks.

Bisbee from the Queen Mine RV Park

This is Main Street. Not too much happening, Bisbee seemed pretty much a ghost town

I stayed at the Queen Mine RV park. It was located right next to the Copper Queen mine and only a matter of walking down the hill to get into town. On one side of the park, you had a mountain, on the another side you had Bisbee laid out in front of you and on the third side you had the Lavender Pit which was an open pit mine, impressive because of it's size. Bisbee is a very walkable town, providing you like hills. The streets are narrow, there was no way I could drive my truck through town. At least not the way I drive. So the location was great.

Speaking of hills, every October, Bisbee has the Bisbee 1000 - The Great Stair Climb. they map out a route that contains different staircases where the number of steps is 1000. Last year, the fastest person did it in about a half hour. The slowest came in at two and a half hours. I am in Bisbee for four days - I decided that was probably how long it would take me. I actually only climbed about two thirds of the steps - I might perhaps have taken a day off from climbing here and there.

Climbing Steps

I also took a tour of the Queen Mine. That was fun, you put a hard hat on, they give you a little light, put you on a little train and take you into the mine.

All family groups are socially distanting and masked

This was the commode that they used in the mines. Empting this was considered the best job in the mines and usually went to an older miner with seniority. Nobody would sit next to you at the bar because you might have had a slight odor, but you sure didn't have to do the back-breaking miner work.

There was a small town called Lowell, right next to Bisbee. It was only one street but they had parked all of these old cars up and down the street.

The Greyhound bus had seen better days but it was still stellar in it's own way

No matter where you walked, there was always something interesting to see.

Or perhaps a little un-nerving

Even the statutes were masked. Bisbee passed an ordinance or something that said if you were on the streets of Bisbee you need to wear a mask. They took it very seriously.