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1002 Naco Highway, Bisbee, Arizona, 85603, United States
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Parking is at a premium in Bisbee. As you drive toward the old part of town you will see a large parking area on the left. It will cost you $5 to park there. There is also a small parkimg area to the left which is free. Walking through Old Bisbee, looking at the buildings and watching the people.
Staying at The Shady Dell is a trip back in time. We stayed in every trailer over the course of 3 years & each one has it's own unique experience. Our last one was The Royal Mansion & it was fabulous! It's the largest one they have & great for having parties. The Homemade is the smallest & has a really comfortable bed. Very cozy, don't be intimidated by it's size. Staying in this vingtage trailer
I was surprised to see very many old, say over 15-20 years old, cars still in use in Bisbee. They perfectly fit to Old Times charm of Bisbee and local, partly pretty renovated old houses. Although when Bisbee was founded and grew up as a mining boomtown, the world's largest mining town and the largest city between San Francisco and Saint Louis, that was at turn of the 19th and the 20th century there were horses and horsecoaches, not cars.
Well, I had to think whether it is a thing of local fashion or poverty to use old cars. I think both. Bisbee is not a ghost town and it develops quite fast. Poverty and unemployment in Bisbee is below average to Arizona. Anyway, there is large contrast between relatively new and modern cars of visitors parked down Old Bisbee and those parked up by local houses.
I was surprised when I once wrote in a car magazine that average car registered in the USA is over 10 years old and older than in my homecountry, Poland. Well, most American families have 2 or more cars and they may rarely use the oldest ones. And they don't care that much (in contrast to Germans and Austrians and similar to Scandinavians in Europe) how old their car is, it would be enough comfortable and not to stop unexpectadly on a road.
Additional bags for shopping may be necessary. Pack sun glasses and comfortable shoes for hiking the Mule Mountains! Light cotton clothes (shorts, T-shirts) for warm or hot days. Sweater/pullover and/or jacket/coat for colder evenings/nights. Bisbee is situated in the Mule Mountains at an elevation of 4,540 feet (1690 m) thus both days and especially nights are colder than in say Tucson. Difference in day-night temperature may be high. Pretty warm days but freezing nights and even snow in winter are common!
Check weather forecast for Bisbee now. Good sun protection cosmetics with high UV filter - use them BEFORE or just after you leave your car. Lots of film or memory cards and your polarizer lenses, enhancing lenses especially for pictures at bright sunlight. Tourist frige with ice cubes and cold beverages inside :-). A lot of drinking water for hiking trips around Mule Mountains.
It's the largest mankind hole in the earth I've ever seen. The abandoned pit is 950 feet (290 m) deep, that's like almost 100-floor skyscraper. I also paid attention to interesting colours and shape of some rocks down. If your sight is good, you should see very little entrance to an undergraound tunnel far down on the left, above the dark brown, acid water of the bottom pond.
Well, I am not a fun of geology and I stopped at this place by coincidence looking for a parking lot to get some food from a trunk. Driving Highway 80 east from Old Bisbee towards Douglas I had to notice information signs on Lavender pit observation photo point. But I had no idea what Lavander pit meant in English. I thought about flowers (lavenders) while in reality Lavander is a surname. And I sadly thought about PIT that's in Polish a name of the tax form we have to fill in annually by 31 April.
I stopped at a large but completely empty parking lot with the Blue Shop which was closed and commemorative plaque explaining who was Lavender and why the pit was named after him (picture 2). I also saw metal fence taller than I was, luckily with holes for a camera. It was after six and shortly before sunset. It was wrong time for taking pictures of dark pit's bottom. And the place looked rather scarry that time.
The Lavender Pit belonged to the Copper Queen Mine, run by the Phelps Dodge Corporation from 1879 to 1975. Mining took place in underground tunnels and shafts until 1951 when it was determined, that an open pit mine would be an economical way to increase ore yield. Over a billion tons of copper was mined from this pit, with good amounts of gold, silver and lead also being extracted. Turquoise was also a by-product of local mining activity. Bisbee turquoise, also known as Bisbee Blue, is said to be amongst the finest turquoise found anywhere in the world. Mining in the pit stopped in 1974 and all mining operation ceased in the Copper Queen Mine in 1975 when the price of copper plummeted.
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Address: 1002 Naco Highway, Bisbee, Arizona, 85603, United States
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