United States
Bisbee
A copper mine town turned art colony jammed into a canyon with more stairs than streets.
Bisbee clings to the walls of Tombstone Canyon, houses stacked so steeply that front doors open onto a neighbour's roofline. Staircases stand in for pavements, murals cover the old mining walls, and a guitar drifts up from a gallery-café three levels below your feet.
Bisbee was one of the richest copper camps in history, its mines yielding on the order of eight billion pounds of the metal before the last shaft closed in 1975, and the vast terraced Lavender Pit, named for a mining executive rather than a colour, still gapes beside the road into town. When the company left, artists, musicians and desert eccentrics moved into the emptying miners' cottages, and the improbable art colony they built is now the town's second ore body. At a mile high, Bisbee escapes the desert heat below, and its jumble of Victorian and improvised architecture leans off the canyon at angles no planner approved. Each autumn the Bisbee 1000 races entrants up roughly a thousand steps of the public staircases that once carried miners home.
Solo
The stairways and alleys reward aimless wandering: a vintage shop in a former mortuary, a poetry reading in a mining hall, conversations that start themselves.
Couple
The canyon squeezes the town into intimacy; every switchback shares another rooftop view and every gallery-café has a table for two on a landing.
Friends
Descend into the old Queen Mine together, then work along Brewery Gulch, once among the rowdiest streets in the West and still keeping its hours.
- One of history's richest copper camps, Bisbee dug out on the order of eight billion pounds before the mines closed in 1975.
- Whole neighbourhoods connect by public staircases rather than roads, a legacy of hillside homes only reachable on foot.
- The 1902 Copper Queen Hotel still operates from the mining boom, built for the company's investors and executives.
- The Bisbee 1000 stair-climb races entrants up roughly a thousand steps of the town's historic staircases each autumn.
The Copper Queen Skillet at the breakfast institution filling Lowell's old Rexall pharmacy since 2005.
A drink in the Copper Queen Hotel's saloon, pouring under the same pressed-tin ceilings since 1902.
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