Bisbee, Arizona & Silver City, New Mexico (October 2013)

---

Bisbee, Arizona and Silver City, New Mexico

We visited these two old mining towns that have re-invented themselves as artists’ communities, on succeeding days and were charmed by both. Neither of these towns did we know anything about before we saw them on the route we were following and did a small bit of research and thought they would be worth stopping at and exploring; we feel like we ‘discovered’ them and that is one of the reasons for this adventure!

Bisbee, population about 7000, sits on the slope of a narrow gorge about 30 miles north of the Mexican border (and 25 miles south of the famous town of Tombstone). The mine ceased operations in 1975 after producing over 6 billion dollars’ worth of metals, mostly copper, since it opened in the 1880s. At its heights in 1900 it was the largest city in America between New Orleans and San Francisco. Tours of the mine are offered by men in purple-painted vans that meet visitors at the parking lot at the edge of town. We didn’t do this; we are not keen on guided tours (except in very large cities and to get an overview and our bearings before setting out on a walking exploration). We prefer to walk and explore and discover a place for ourselves. We do a small bit of preliminary guidebook reading and visit the Trip Advisor website and see if the New York Times has done a 36Hours article on it and then maybe Google-map search of the Old Town/Downtown area before arriving and then we forget most of it and commence our walkabout with only a vague notion of where we want to walk and what we want to see and usually find ourselves saying to each other: ‘Oh yeah, I remember reading about that ...’ What we find interests and fascinates and amuses us most is never found in the guidebook or internet search but what we unexpectedly stumble upon during our wanderings.

Our first stop was a small closet-like space at the entrance way to the post office where a woman in her mid-sixties was attending a donations bookshop in aid of the local library. We browsed and chatted and discovered that her and her husband, while in their early 50s, had taken a year off to travel because they wanted to have the experience while they were still fit and healthy enough to fully enjoy and appreciate it (sound familiar?)! One of their destinations then was Ireland. We purchased a local-author crime novel there and left behind as donations to the library two books we were finished with and continued on our walkabout.

We walked up the main street. Nearly every store front was an art gallery (many galleries in the southwest seem to be artist-run co-operatives in which the artists share the space and also the attendance duties), a craft shop, a bar/restaurant, a clothing store. There was also one of the funkiest bookstores I have ever visited. It is in an old JC Penny building (JC Penny was similar to Woolworths or Cleary’s in Dublin) and in addition to having a mix of new and old books (including a comprehensive selection of crime writer JA Jance’s novels – she being a native daughter of Bisbee), it featured all manner of other goods including loads of old second hand vinyl records, cassettes and VHS videos, cards and gifty whatnots, art supplies, musical instruments, old magazines, old bottles, lots of other junk I can’t remember (I wish I had taken a few photos in the store). We stopped in a few galleries and gift shops and at every one we were warmly welcomed and then welcomed again when after a brief conversation we were asked where we were from and we said Ireland. These storekeepers were without exception very pleasant and very chatty. Continuing up the hill in search of the chocolate shop (it was closed) and the High Desert Cafe that was recommended by the library bookstore attendant, we came across another thing difficult to describe (but which I did take a photo of): it is the remains of a house with a picture over the what is left of the fireplace, an ironing board, the brightly-painted frame of a bed, a chair and table and a half-buried guitar; it seemed like a shrine. We very nearly turned back then but we saw a sign urging us to continue (also photographed) so we did. And the cafe at the top of this street, opposite the iconic Iron man statue, was worth seeking out. The cafe consists of a shop selling local goods and other essentials like beer and hard cider, a kitchen producing lunch as well as an amazing-looking assortment of cakes and cookies, and a coffee area grinding and preparing fresh strong coffee. We had a coffee and a peanut butter and chocolate cheese pie that was heavenly: rich, creamy and smooth and very large. All the other pies looked equally delicious. We bought a chocolate chip cookie with walnuts and coconut for the road!

We walked back down through town and then up a side street in search of a Vietnamese restaurant we had read about. We found a very strange building surrounded and covered with all manner of very colourful junk (another photo provided). Opposite were a couple of young men posing in a derelict site in the Day of the Dead (Halloween to Europeans) masks (another photo provided). All the walls of this derelict site were covered in paintings – neither a mural nor graffiti but it all seemed to fit together. We walked by the local brewery that was receiving the delivery of a trailer load of hops and for a moment we were transported back to Dublin’s St.James’s Gate outside the Guinness Brewery. And we finally located the Vietnamese restaurant, right across the street from the parking lot where we had parked Rudy V.

From there we trundled – there is no other word for it, it won’t go faster than 40 miles per hour uphill – along Route 80 down through Douglas (within stone-throwing distance of the Mexican border) and then north on a scenic drive through the endless acres of wilderness back toward Interstate 10. We turned off, after stopping for a Joan-prepared meal, and proceeded to Silver City on Route 90.

Waking early the next morning, drove into the downtown Silver City, New Mexico at 8am and found the Yankie Creek Cafe for breakfast and wifi. It is not like we were looking for it specifically but after we parked Rudy V outside Millie’s Bake House and discovered it closed and not opening until 10, we walked a few yards and asked a man with a large cup of coffee in his hand where was the place he got his morning coffee. He motioned behind him to a store that looked closed but was in fact the Yankie Creek Cafe. And then he asked us where we were from and offered us a very friendly and warm welcomed to Silver City. What a comfortable place to have a bite of breakfast and catch up on emails. The proprietor was named Dale and had long hair flowing down his back. He explained his breakfast menu to us with great care and patience, even when his pronunciation of ‘croissant’ sounded foreign to our ears and we had to ask him to repeat it several times until we understood him. We both had a frittata-like (although he called it something else we can’t remember) egg that was made with sausage and herbs and was very tasty. And his Colombian coffee was full-bodied and not the weak-kneed stuff masquerading as coffee that most Americans seem to prefer. We hooked up to his quick and reliable wifi connection and spent the next two hours catching up on emails. An old New York Times 36Hours article featured a photograph of this very cafe! The rest of the article advised, basically, just walking around and visiting the many art galleries on the main street and connecting streets. So that is what we did; and the galleries were many and of a very high standard offering original and unique artwork, sculpture and crafts and cards. They seem also to be primarily of a co-operative nature like we found in Bisbee.

Silver City, a town of about 10,000 people, is located on a plane about 6000 feet above sea level between the Big Burro Mountains of the Gila National Forest and the Mimbres Mountains. A couple other nearby mountains just to the north soar to over 10,000 feet. This area is known as a high desert plain, is semi-arid, forested and volcanic, and little changed since the Apache chief Geronimo was born in the region. The Spanish arrived in the area in 1804, captured and sold the natives into slavery, and opened a copper mine. And then in the 1870s, after the eastward-expanding ‘Americans’ kicked out the Spanish (I think, it is very many years since my high school American history class) the town was re-established as a silver camp. Billy the Kid spent most of his childhood here. While there is still mining nearby, the down town area has become a haven for hippy-artist types. One of them told us that she moved to New Mexico because it had four seasons as opposed to the neighbouring state of Arizona where she used to live and where it is always just too hot. There are at least a dozen art gallery co-operatives as well as an upscale food market and a couple of vintage clothing stores and a store with high quality modern women’s clothes (but no bookstores, at least downtown). There is also a highly-regarded ice cream store that purports to sell homemade Italian-style gelato that is as good as the original stuff (but Joan wouldn’t let me taste test any!). We spent a very enjoyable 3 hours browsing the galleries and shops and chatting with their attendant artists and had lunch at a long-established restaurant called Diane’s that in the evening splits into a bar called The Parlor featuring live music and a smaller dinner restaurant. Diane’s also has a bakery/deli nearby.

We visited on 31^st October and there were parades of costumed children going around the town trick-or-treating and one group paused to give us a wave!

We stopped at Millie’s Bake House to buy a couple giant cookies for the road before heading to the mountain pass of the Gila National Forest, the road through which is very twisty and windy and the drop sheer and the going very very slow. (Poor Rudy V chugged at an average of 20 miles per hour over the nearly 50 mile trek.) Around the mid-point of the journey we had reached an elevation of around 8600 feet above sea level and the views were simply stunning. We turned north onto Route 25 at Caballo and this van driver was very happy to see the straight and fat highway unrolling steadily and easily ahead toward Albuequerque, Santa Fe and Taos!

---