Up the Down Staircase: a Walking Tour of Bisbee, Arizona by Gregory McNamee
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Just to the west of Bisbee, a quiet old town nestled in the Mule Mountains of Cochise County, stands an automobile tunnel. Completed over half a century ago in 1958, it is one of the very few in Arizona, and one where the road builders had previously preferred, it seems, to climb up and over and along the faces of rocky impediments, rather than blast through them and ruin a good thrill ride.
Bisbee was noisier back when the tunnel was built, when great machines hauled up loads of copper from the earth around the clock and, presumably, dynamite to punch holes through mountains was plentiful.
The Mule Pass Tunnel
The Mule Pass Tunnel is a fine thing as tunnels go but when I drop into Bisbee, as I often do, I prefer the old-fashioned approach, over the Old Divide Road. As its name hints, the road, which climbs over Mule Mountain and the tunnel, crosses a geographical divide at an elevation of 6,030 feet. As it arcs its way up to the summit, the road affords a superb view of the old town and on to the giant Copper Queen mine pit. Looking down into the old town’s maze of winding streets, alleyways, and staircases, it also suggests any number of ways in which an intrepid traveller can get around on foot.
Unlike newer, more spread-out cities on the desert floor elsewhere in Arizona, Bisbee is hemmed in by rugged mountains and steep canyons that confine it to an old-fashioned, human and walkable scale. Thanks to geography, the heart of Bisbee can be traversed in a pleasant hour. A more adventurous tour, heading for higher ground and working along the rim of the mountains above, can take hours longer, taking in a much bigger chunk of territory and involving a marathon runner’s dose of exercise. Both possibilities offer many attractions.
I’m a perambulator myself, inclined to a more philosophical approach to the business of getting around. First comes a single step. Another step follows, then another, and then another and we’re walking. Doing one of the very few things that only our species can do. That much is reason enough to celebrate getting out of a vehicle and strolling. On an easy pass, a walker can burn 200 to 300 calories per hour, shedding pounds with minimal exertion. Which makes it about the gentlest form of exercise there is.
But the benefits of walking go well beyond the purely physical. More than any other activity, walking is a sure way to jump-start the brain, to set thoughts in motion and calm our troubles.
Brain Power
Prompted by our modest exertions and just a few minutes into a walk, the body begins to produce endorphins; chemical compounds that reduce pain and stress, enhance memory and judgment and increase feelings of well-being as they course into the brain. Along with endorphins, walking produces increased levels of serotonin; an important brain neurotransmitter that further serves to reduce stress, for which reason doctors increasingly recommend walking as a treatment for mild depression and anxiety.
That, I think, is why the ancient Greek philosophers prided themselves on being peripatetic – a fancy term for ‘walking around’ – and why great thinkers ever since have taken to the quiet lanes to get their pondering done.
Which brings us to Brewery Gulch: the spiritual center of old Bisbee and a place where any amiable amble of Bisbee should start. Brewery Gulch has a brighter visage than in days past, when, to put it charitably, many of its old pieces seemed in danger of crumbling to dust. Things have been patched, painted and restored and new shops and galleries line the winding road. The chances are good that the people you’ll meet will have a philosophical approach to the business of making a living; one works in order to live. One does not live in order to work.
In a beautifully appointed art gallery next door to a suspiciously subversive rendering of the Mona Lisa, one young woman said “I got this job just because I needed to work for a couple of days a week. I needed something to give my life some structure and direction.” I sympathised, of course, but then thought of the mound of deadlines and paper piled high atop my desk and thought, a little grumpily, that I could use a little less structure and direction myself.
Ambitious Walker
I’ve been strolling up and down Brewery Gulch for a third of a century now, and it has been ever thus. In some circles here, that is, work is most definitely a four-letter word. But, ambler though I am, I’ve taken at least some of my cues from an uncharacteristically ambitious walker who, no matter where I was in town, could always be seen striding purposefully off in the distance, up on a hillside or down the canyon, ever in view.
He knew the good paths, and I was careful to look where he went and follow at a discreet distance, getting a good workout in the bargain. Stories were whispered about him, and they seldom agreed on any particulars except that he had been a NASA scientist assigned to a tracking station out in the middle of the Australian desert, where he was alone for months at a time. The darkness and space were too much, the stories continued, and he quit, thereafter to wander the streets of Bisbee like some landlocked ancient mariner.
I haven’t seen him in years, but as I wandered up Brewery Gulch on a recent morning I thought of our last encounter. I was ascending a staircase – more about staircases later – one moon-washed evening when he came around a corner, silent as an owl, and grinned at me. The moment might have done a ghost proud and I about jumped out of my skin until I finally made out the features of his face in the moonlight and recognised who he was. I greeted him and he treated me to a tour of the night sky. One that would have cost a hefty admission fee at any planetarium worth visiting. A tour, I might add, whose details I remember vividly whenever that time of year comes and the constellations line up in the same order.
Tombestone Canyon
If Brewery Gulch seems to be sprucing up a touch, then Tombstone Canyon has gone positively upscale. Beginning down, in what was once a draw beneath the city’s grande dame, the Copper Queen Hotel, Main Street passes the beautifully refurbished Phelps-Dodge Mercantile building, which now houses a couple of restaurants, gift shops, and offices. It then winds past the Bisbee Public Library, one of the handsomest such institutions in the whole of Arizona by my lights.
Bookstores, more restaurants, more gift shops, and a few antique outlets that draw collectors from all over the country grace the upper end of the street, which makes a turn to the northeast at the geological landmark called Castle Rock and turns into Tombstone Canyon Road.
I stop at the rock to pay homage to the ghost of miner George Warren, who lived alone below the rock, far from any other buildings, back in the 1880s. Old George was fond of the bottle and incapable of passing up a bet, and for a time he cooled his heels in the territorial insane asylum, but he still managed to make enough discoveries to have merited the city’s richest mining district’s being named for him.
It didn’t take long for Tombstone Canyon to fill up with houses, and by 1910 the lower elevations of Castle Rock were lined with two and three-story buildings. Some of them, such as the magnificent Muirhead House, along with their modern descendants, still stand here neat as a pin and happily shaded by tall cottonwood trees.
Bohemian Old Bus Station
One of my favorite houses in the whole of Bisbee stands just beyond the rock. Once the town’s bus station, it’s been owned by a succession of bohemians and artists. The last of whom – one a painter and the other a retired player in a Bay Area symphony – turned the exterior walls into a kind of folk-art museum: enshrining old bicycles, Etch-a-Sketches, tools, hard hats, furniture, cooking utensils and other bric-a-brac all painted a can’t-miss shade of orange. The place is up for sale as I write, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the new owner decides that the, admittedly deeply eccentric, décor is worth keeping. To do so would fit in perfectly with the overall spirit of the town, which has always been, well, deeply eccentric.
Outside this impromptu museum, if you look closely, you’ll see what seems to me to be one of the greatest architectural curiosities in all the land: the houses on the east side of the street are built atop thick concrete slabs that span a deep arroyo that flows swiftly every time it rains. Given that much of old Bisbee was burned to the ground in a catastrophic fire on October 14, 1908, perhaps the builders felt more comfortable having a source of flame-dousing water so close to hand. More likely, however, the slabs offered a kind of solution to the shortage of real estate in the narrow canyon: if you want to build a house, first you have to build someplace to put it, over water or in thin air, as the neighboring houses way up on stilts attest.
The architecture here is a little catch as catch can. A little improvisational. A little iffy. But certainly interesting and proof positive of the poet Richard Shelton’s writings of a place in which, generation after generation, “everything breaks down and goes wrong and everybody laughs, picks up the pieces and tries to patch them back together again.”
Every street, every alleyway and every path in this old part of town leads to a surprise: a sculpture, a bank of stained-glass windows, a well-tended postage-stamp garden, and an old truck that’s like hasn’t been made for half a century. Every one of those trails offers fine views, with some at the higher elevations commanding vistas that take in the whole town.
Great Stair Climb
But the streets aren’t the only places to explore here. No visit to Bisbee would be complete without at least a quick detour up the city’s signature staircases, nine of which comprise the course that marks the annual Bisbee 1000 Great Stair Climb. The course begins at the city park band shell up Brewery Gulch climbing up 73 fairly easy stairs. As it wanders up Brewery Canyon, the course then meets the 100-step set deemed Opera, leading to a road that eventually arrives at the old opera house.
The course flattens out along the aptly named High Road, and on to what’s called the Subway. There, at the Bisbee Visitor Center, the course becomes more challenging, assuming Everest-like proportions for the untrained stair-stomper; in quick succession come the 181-step Maxfield segment, the 79-step Spalding, and the 151-step Rose. You’ll be forgiven if you feel a little winded after all that climbing, but the hard work is done. All that’s left to do is wander down Clawson Avenue and back to the starting point, with a detour down Tombstone Canyon if you wish.
You don’t have to have anything particular on your mind to justify lacing up your walking shoes and heading out the door to Bisbee; Arizona’s preeminent point of perambulation. Henry David Thoreau, the New England sage, sang the praises of sauntering: of walking with no destination or end in mind. He also counseled that every walk be undertaken in the spirit of some unknown adventure and the walker is prepared for the unforeseen possibility of wonder.
Thoreau knew that wonder would come, quickly and of its own accord, for, as we saunter, poking along at a three-mile-an-hour gait, we see and encounter things that, hidden behind walls or windshields, we would probably otherwise miss. So it is in old Bisbee.
“Life is already too short to waste on speed,” said my old friend Edward Abbey and he was right. Down these winding paths lays plenty of evidence for why it’s well worth the trouble to slow down and plenty of unexpected treasures as a reward.
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