Tombstone, Southern Arizona, and the Surface of the Sun!
Our first destination in southern Arizona was the legendary town of Tombstone, made famous for the infamous Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. To get to Tombstone we flew into Phoenix, rented a car, and set out on the three hour drive to get there. Along the way you will pass Tuscon about halfway down Interstate 10. When you get past Tuscon you have two choices to get to Tombstone, the direct way down Arizona 80 through the town of Benson, or the scenic way down Arizona 83 through the Coronado National Forest. For us, we took the scenic way. The trip is actually about the same amount of time, the only difference is how much civilization you want to see. There is almost none on Arizona 83, and then you take the only left for twenty miles on Arizona 82 (I'm sensing a pattern here with their highways) to head east towards Tombstone. When you get to Tombstone you have very limited choices where to stay. Most of the visitors to Tombstone come for the day and head back to Tuscon. The nicest hotel in town was easily the Tombstone Grand Hotel, which I would equate to a Quality Inn or Hampton Inn. They had a small pool, free breakfast, wifi, and plenty of parking, so we took it. The rest of the hotels in town are roadside motels that have been there for fifty years.
Tombstone is obviously known for their famed feud between the Earp's and the Cowboys, but the real history of the town is that of a silver mine, and the boom of miners that came to town looking to get rich quick. Founded in 1879, the town exploded, and men from across the West descended on the town. Many were former Civil War soldiers, from both sides, and the mood of the town was quite combustible when men who were working hard in extreme heat took to drinking at night. Following the gunfight and feud the town continued on, burned down multiple times, and finally turned its attention to making money off the town legends in the middle of the 20th Century. The historic downtown is not very big, no more than four blocks, but in that area you have the location of the O.K. Corral (which it was not actually called), the Crystal Palace (one of the famed saloons of the early days), and the Bird Cage Theatre (one of only two original buildings to the city that did not burn down in the two town fires). Several times a day the actors at the O.K. Corral reenact the famous gunfight, with about a ten minute show that fills in some of the missing history of the fight. The actors will walk down the dusty streets much like the scene in the famous 1993 film, and are happy to take pictures with you. The truth of the matter, and one they are not afraid to share, is that the Earp family was not much more noble than the outlaws they were chasing. While I recommend going to the show, and wandering through the museum attached to the corral, do NOT in anyway go to the Historama show that comes with the ticket. This "multimedia history" as they call it, is literally a fifty year old video with Vincent Price as the narrator telling you a story that is seriously in the lowest definition I've ever seen. If you do decide to go, don't go by the start time on the ticket, they start the show when they want. We showed up at 2:55pm for the 3:00pm show only to be told it had started and we would have to wait. We waited, and we suffered once we actually saw the show. After the show walk down to the Bird Cage Theatre. A famous saloon from the 1880's, the front is a free museum of some of the town's questionable past, and the guide uses that to lure you into the paid portion of the museum which includes some fun items like old gambling tables that Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp used. From there walk down to Big Nose Kate's Saloon for some lunch. This bar and restaurant sits on the location of The Oriental, the bar Wyatt Earp and his brothers co-owned while in town. Today they have live music every day during lunch, and mouthy waitresses dressed like Old West ladies of negotiable affection to serve you food. Don't just stay in the the downtown area. About a mile from downtown, down a dirt road path, is the Ed Schieffelin monument dedicated to the man who founded Tombstone. While not much to look at, it is one of the few truly historic sites there from the late 1800's. You can also stop for a beer at the Tombstone Brewing Company, a pretty good local brewery. If you go don't plan on any air conditioning, and apparently every fly in Arizona is attracted to the brewery, but their beer is very good. If you do decide to go to southern Arizona, I am going to make a suggestion. DO NOT STAY IN TOMBSTONE. While the town in fun, it can easily be seen in a full day. Get there early in the morning and hang around until the shops close around 5:00pm, and you will be done. We made the mistake of staying there overnight. The town is so remote the restaurants in town literally close down at 7:30pm, despite the signs on the door that say they are open until 9:00pm. The first night we were lucky to get into a restaurant early enough to eat, but the second night we went to every restaurant in town, and by 8:00pm they were all closed. There is no grocery story there (the closest one is twenty miles away), so one lady suggested we go to the gas station and get some chips and drinks for dinner, but we needed to hurry because it closed at 9:00pm. While in the gas station parking lot I stopped a town police officer and explained our situation to him of not having anywhere to eat. He said that is a common problem for people staying the night, but thankfully suggested we visit Johnny Ringo's, a local bar on the edge of town. He told us Johnny Ringo's was not really a restaurant, but may make us some pizzas if we asked. We did visit, and they did make us some delicious pizzas, or at least they seemed delicious out of desperation.
After wandering around Tombstone the first night, I realized we were not going to need the entire day to see it, so I started looking for something to do the next morning. Looking on a map, I found a national park I had never heard of called Chiricahua National Monument. About an hour and a half drive from Tombstone, Chiricahua sits on the border with New Mexico, and contains some of the most stunning physical geography I have ever seen. The park is so remote the number of visitors in a day couldn't possibly exceed thirty. The park ranger genuinely looked stunned when we walked in, and another visitor walked in ten seconds later. There is no fee to enter, and the roads in the park are very well maintained. They have multiple hiking trails that range from less than half a mile to more than ten miles deep into the belly of the park. All along the trails you will see rock formations shooting up from the ground demonstrating millions of years of erosion. Some of these formations are more than a hundred feet tall, and some formations are sitting so precariously that you feel like the slightest breeze will knock them over. While you are there be sure to go on the Echo Canyon trail to see the grotto that the ancient Native Americans must have felt like was carved for the gods themselves. If you feel really daring you can rent horses to ride on the trails, but I would only suggest doing this if you are truly an experienced rider. Some of these trails were very narrow, steep, and rocky. Also, be sure to take some water and hiking sticks with you when you go. I can't stress this enough how remote this park is, and how long you may have to wait for someone to come by if something were to happen.
After leaving Tombstone on the second day, we decided to head down to a town about twenty miles south called Bisbee. A very cooky town located just eight miles from the Mexican border, Bisbee has been a mecca for both hardworking miners and farmers, but also some off the beaten path artists and musicians. A metropolis compared to Tombstone, Bisbee has about 5,000 people, and is full of small hotels, restaurants, shops, galleries, and just about anything else you can imagine. We spent the 4th of July there, and as always we found a town with a tradition that is hard to explain. While walking between their local microbrewery and the restaurant we wanted to eat lunch at we saw the people of the town gathering for some sort of festival. In the town square locals began competing in the Bisbee Drilling and Mucking Contest, a local tradition for more than a century one local told me. A giant slab of granite is set in the town square. One man then has ten minutes to chisel a hole as deep as he can. The people of the town watched in awe as these men hammered and hammered. They had a local band of teenagers playing near the granite entertaining people while they waited for the official measurements. After that, the mucking began. Men would work in pairs to fill an old mine cart with gravel as quickly as possible. They even had a youth mucking contest. This looked a lot more like kids throwing gravel any direction they could than an organized contest, but the kids were having fun. The square was filled with everyone from out of towners like us, to local families, to the town motorcycle club, and everyone seemed to be having a great time. After you wander in and out of the antique, book, hat, metal work, and many other types of shops that line the streets, make sure you go to lunch at Santiago's right in the heart of town near the town hall. This is one of the greatest Mexican restaurants either of us has ever eaten at (understandably so being within walking distance of the border), and we would go back in a heart beat just for their food. If you are visiting this area I want to emphasize to stay in Bisbee, not Tombstone. The people of the town were very nice, and there were literally ten times more things to see and do.
Wendy and I went to southern Arizona to visit the town of Tombstone to see a town that has been a part of every young man's dreams since the first time they heard the story of good guys fighting bad guys. What we found was a fun place to visit for the day, and two other locations that were even more enjoyable than Tombstone. If you go, please take the time to visit these other two locations as you will see two places that many Americans have never heard of, but they are two places that everyone who ever visits them will always remember.
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