Bisbee

Bisbee appears below the highway suddenly, in the way that mining towns often do — tucked into a canyon in the Mule Mountains near the Mexican border, its Victorian buildings stacked up the hillsides like a children’s toy town that someone assembled without quite following the instructions. I came down from Tombstone on Route 80, and the drive into Bisbee’s Mule Pass Tunnel and then out into the canyon felt like passing through a portal. The town that appeared on the other side — painted houses in colors that mining engineers wouldn’t have approved, steep staircases connecting streets that refuse to be parallel, a bar called the St. Elmo that has been serving miners and now serves artists since 1902 — looked nothing like Arizona and everything like a place that had decided to be exactly itself.

From 1880 to 1975, Bisbee produced six billion pounds of copper and was the largest city between St. Louis and San Francisco. The Phelps Dodge Corporation ran the mines and the town and the lives of the people in it, and then the copper ran out and the company left and Bisbee had to figure out what it was without an industry. What it chose to become — through a long, accidental process involving hippies in the 1970s, artists in the 1980s and 1990s, and recently a wave of remote workers who discovered that Victorian houses with canyon views cost almost nothing — is one of the more unlikely cultural experiments in the American Southwest.

The Lavender Pit, visible from the highway at the edge of town, is the open-cut copper mine that replaced the underground workings in the 1950s and in doing so removed an entire neighborhood called Lowell — 47 city blocks scooped out to reach the ore below. The pit is now a three-kilometer-wide hole in the earth, its terraced walls in shades of turquoise and lavender from the oxidized copper minerals, surrounded by a railing where visitors stop and lean and look down at the scale of what industry does when it has license to do it. There is a placard that mentions the displaced neighborhood without dwelling on it. I found myself dwelling on it.

The Queen Mine Tour takes you underground in a mine train — the same narrow cars and tracks that ran ore to the surface when the mine was active — into a shaft that descends 120 meters into the mountain. The guide, a retired miner named Gene on the day I went, explained the drilling and blasting sequences in the cadences of someone who had done the actual work and wanted you to know it. The tunnel smells of sulfur and cold stone, and at a quarter mile in they turn off all the lights to show you what the miners worked in before electricity, and the darkness is of a specific completeness that you don’t often encounter.

The bar and restaurant scene in Bisbee is modest in size and peculiarly warm. The Copper Queen Hotel — a 1902 building that serves as the social center of the old town — has a bar where the conversation ranges from mining history to poetry to local border politics, often within the same hour. Down Brewery Gulch, the St. Elmo serves cold beer and not much else, which is enough. The Good Oak Bar does serious cocktails in a narrow space where the shelves are lined with books and the music is always something you don’t expect. I ate well at Café Cornucopia, which serves the kind of breakfast that makes you understand why people move to small desert towns and stay.

When to go: October through April is ideal — Bisbee sits at 1,600 meters elevation, which makes it cooler than Phoenix but still walkable in winter. Spring wildflowers in the Mule Mountains are excellent in March and April. Summer brings afternoon monsoon storms that make the canyon scenery dramatic and occasionally muddy. The Bisbee 1000 stair climb in October is a local institution worth timing your visit around.