Bisbee Queen Mine - Montezuma Pass - Border Road 61

After a night at the Hotel Gadsden with optional heat, dripping faucets, an unsecured wifi network named "linksys" that gets more bars the closer you are to the stuffed mountain lion, and a meal that more or less qualified as breakfast, we headed out to Bisbee, and funky mining town of houses perched on rocky outcrops.  $8bn worth of copper, silver gold & lead was extracted here from the late 1800s through until 1946, when the big mine played out.  The town almost became another ghost town, but for a bunch of hippies from California who liked the climate and free real estate.  This influence is still felt today, to judge by the number of coffee shops, organic food stores and new age services.

After a brief tour of the town, we went to the Queen Mine for a tour.

Entrance to the tour

Visitors don jacket and hard hat with lamp, and ride personnel cart 1500 feet horizontally into the mine, for guided tours by former miners

Afterwards, we headed out for Coronado National Monument to show Ian the Montezuma pass and the views in each direction.  (See earlier post)  Ian did most of the driving, to get some dirt/mountain road experience.

Shortly after leaving the pass, a man stepped out of the bush and tried to flag us down.  Ian wisely kept going.  If it was someone genuinely in distress, the frequent border patrols would find him and give proper aid.  If he was trying to evade the Customs and Border Patrol, well, that could spell robbery, car-jacking or worse.  Some guide books warn about this. 

We turned onto Forest Road 61 a short time later, and I showed Ian the pretty and lonely country along the Mexican border, through Lochiel and Duquesne.  We came across several new items since my earlier trip with Elfrida:

• two manned armored personnel carriers, stationed on local high points
• a newly graded road heading in a straight line towards the border, with a porta-potty every 500 feet for as far as the eye can see, purpose unknown
• nearby, a crew of three civilians erecting an antenna that looks like a metallic miniature palm tree; they are pointing at the blimp permanently moored over distant Fort Huachuca and reading some instrument; they stop and watch us as we pass.
• Several graders; they appear to be widening this road in places (probably a good thing)
• Several new CPB observation posts mounted on cherry-pickers
• A military transport truck carrying fuel, presumably for the armored personnel carriers.  The white pickup truck preceeding it is manned by soldiers in combat fatigues who signal us to pull off the road to let them pass.

We come out at the Patagonia Highway and make our way to Tucumcacori, where we stop at Wisdom's cafe for lunch on the patio.  Then back to Tucson.