Arizona, New Mexico & the Grand Canyon Trips (Lonely Planet, 1st Edition) - Aaron Anderson [25]
Ease 130 miles down I-10 to Tucson and watch the desert get as flat as a board. Timewarp into yesteryear at the Hotel Congress, with its radio-only rooms and Sam Spade movie set decor. Speaking of drama, bank robber John Dillinger spent a night on the 3rd floor here, until a fire drove him out and, soon enough, into the cuffs of lawmen.
The next morning, stop by the University of Arizona Mineral Museum to listen to Reed’s miner interviews and ogle mondo crystals. If you’re traveling with kids, you’ll appreciate Old Tucson, which provides a G-rated picture of Arizona’s outlaw days. Originally built as a film set, it’s now a sort of Wild West theme park set in a huge patch of gorgeous cacti. It’s a few miles southeast of the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, off Hwy 86.
Seventy-five miles southeast of Tucson, Tombstone is billed as “the town too tough to die.” Underneath the sometimes-hokey facade lurks an intriguing Wild West history. Visitors can see a reenactment of the shoot out at the OK Corral at 2pm daily, with an additional show at 3:30pm on busy days.
Tombstone’s one-stop sin shop in the 1880s was the Bird Cage Theater – a saloon, dance hall, gambling parlor and home for ‘negotiable affections.’ Today it’s filled with dusty artifacts like Doc Holliday’s old card table. Employees report ghost sightings on a regular basis.
Reed says that mining and gun fighting often came as a pair because back when the West was young, claim borders were often in dispute. A disagreement over 1 cubic yard of land – if that land happened to hold the mother lode – often put a miner 6ft under it. Lots of miners lost their lives in such fights. The Boothill Graveyard, off Hwy 80 about a quarter-mile north of town, is where they take their final nap. The OK Corral’s unlucky threesome are buried in row 2.
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DETOUR
To see a modern mining boom town, head to Safford, 135 miles north of Bisbee, and the nearby Graham County Museum (www.visitgrahamcounty.com). An hour east of Safford, the Morenci Mine Tour ( 877-646-8687) takes visitors to an open-pit mine in a huge truck. Heading back to Phoenix, pass through Globe, another modern mine town, and Superior, where there’s talk of opening the Resolution Copper Mine (www.resolutioncopper.com), a proposed 7000ft-deep shaft that will rely on robotic equipment.
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Twenty-five miles south of Tombstone on Hwy 80 is Bisbee – the number one pick for a mining tour, according to Reed, “not just because it’s very picturesque, but because they’ve done a great job of preserving the history there.” People who have visited San Francisco might have a déjà vu moment: Bisbee’s Victorian buildings are set on rolling hills and the mile-high city is surprisingly cool.
“The parallels between those two cities have always fascinated me,” Reed says. “It’s fitting that a lot of the people who kept this place from turning into a ghost town were part of the whole Haight-Ashbury scene and came here when that broke up. Now Bisbee is a pretty, artsy place and there is no shortage of characters.”
Besides hipness, Bisbee is all about copper. The Copper Queen Hotel was built in 1902 to give visiting fat cats a place to spend the night. Cut right to the crux of the matter – literally –with Queen Mine Tours and delve a quarter-mile straight into the cold earth on a small rail car. Retired miners with firsthand stories of the place serve as guides. Dress as if you’re going into a refrigerator; you’ll receive a safety jacket, hat, and light as accessories.
Dedicate at least two hours to the Bisbee Mining & Historical Museum, a Smithsonian affiliate. It’s housed in the 1897 former headquarters of the Phelps