COCHISE COUNTY AZ 2008

We wanted to spend some time in Cochise County to visit Tombstone and Bisbee.  We had a good time and — as often happens — we found places to see and things to do that we didn’t know anything about until we got there.   We stayed at Tombstone Territories RV Park in Huachuaca City.  http://www.tombstoneterritories.com 

It’s a clean and friendly little park with great mountain views from every angle — and tons of backyard birds.   It’s just 10 miles from Tombstone and 16 miles the other way to Sierra Vista, which is not a tourist destination, but has all the things you need for living.  (A good supermarket, of course, and at this particular time a place to get our hair cut and a place to get the oil changed in the truck.)   

This is BIG country!  We put about a thousand miles on the truck, criss-crossing the area.  The drives were beautiful, though, with the mountains seeming to float on the horizon.  We really enjoyed hiking around the Cochise Stronghold in the Dragoon Mountains.  Cochise was a chief of the Chiricahua Apaches and these rugged mountains served as a fortress, home, and base of operations for him and his followers.    They would have been able to see for miles.  Cochise was said to be a master strategist in planning raids of ranches and stagecoaches and was never conquered in battle.

Tombstone (The Town Too Tough to Die) was fun in the hokey sort of way that makes people our age recall a childhood spent playing Cowboys and Indians.  The shootout at the OK Corral hapened here and there are a lot of actors everywhere in the town, putting on re-enactments as Doc Holliday, Wyatt Earp and others from the 1880s — the town’s heyday.  There are “shootouts” everywhere and  such added touches as people in old west clothes being thrown out of real saloons on a fairly regular basis.  Big Nose Kate’s is a pretty good place to eat and watch the action. (It is named after Doc Holliday’s girlfriend — or one of them, anyway.)

The Birdcage Saloon is the only entirely original building in town.  It was a saloon, honky-tonk, gambling house and “house of ill repute” — entirely legal then.  The “birdcages” are the tiny rooms that were occupied by the working women.  The town was a major stop for famous Vaudeville entertainers; there was a lot of money floating around here back then.

Bisbee, about 30 miles south of Tombstone, is an old mining town, a mile high in the Mule Mountains.  It’s all built in narrow canyons and the old Victorian-style buildings are pretty well preserved.  We toured the now-closed Queen Copper Mine.    It’s been left as it was when copper prices dropped and it ceased operation.  I thought about my grandfather, who had been a mining engineer and used to tell me stories about working in the mines.  I really hadn’t understood very well what it would have been like until this underground tour. The town part of Bisbee is very counter-culture, a real throw-back to the (19)60s.

We drove into the mountains to see the Chiricahua National Monument and did some short trail-walks from off the road.  The scenery was magnificent but we’d like to come back sometime to see more of the back-country.  There’s a bus that takes you to the top and then you can hike down.  We didn’t get there early enough in the day to do that — we drove both ways.   This was the area that we hadn’t really heard much about until we got to Cochise County.   I’m glad we found out about it.