One of the cool things about my job is that some days, I actually get paid to go out and have fun!

OK, not all the time, but one of the things I do for Yuma Visitors Bureau is to write an “attraction of the month” feature for The Sun’s 33.10 supplement. That means I jump in my trusty P.T. Cruiser and head out to check out something to do in Yuma, talk to people and take a bunch of photos.

Then comes the hard part — I have to boil it all down to about 300 words.

This last week, I wrote a story about Castle Dome Mines Museum, which is up in the Kofa National Wildlife Refuge off Highway 95 north of Yuma.

This is a totally amazing place — I could have written volumes more! I ended up talking with Allen Armstrong all afternoon (his fault for being too interesting!), so by the time I left, it was sunset.

Then I kept stopping all along the road to take pictures (the desert’s fault for being too

beautiful!), so I didn’t get back to Yuma until long after what should have been “quittin’ time” (tough life, eh?).

And ever since, I have been talking about Castle Dome Mines Museum to everyone I run into …

I have no idea how I — as a “tourism promotion professional” — could have missed this place before. No question I deserve 50 lashes with a wet egret (that’s probably some kind of violation of the Federal migratory bird laws, though, so I may be safe). On the other hand, even the venerable Arizona Highways only found it recently, as did a writer for the Arizona Republic, so I am in good company …

Allen and his wife Stephanie have recreated an entire town more or less from pieces and parts they’ve recovered from around Castle Dome and elsewhere. And each of the two dozen buildings is pretty much a self-contained museum, full of all kinds of artifacts and items that Allen has discovered in his exploration of the innumerable mine shafts and tunnels of the Castle Dome mining district.

For instance, there’s a pair of Levis that the Armstrongs have dated to the 1890s, decades-old canned goods that look like they just came off the shelf, glassware, china, whiskey and beer bottles, tools, and all kinds of other “stuff.” There are numerous saloons, a mercantile (general store), a barber shop, a dress shop, a church, a stamping mill, a blacksmith’s shop and more stuff I can’t even remember.
And it is all the middle of the most beautiful desert scenery, with a panoramic view towards the Colorado River (where Castle Dome hauled its ore for shipping to a smelter in San Francisco using ten of the largest wagons ever built). It’s like you’ve been set down in the middle of a Western movie set –and not some kind of phony tourist trap place designed to sell you refrigerator magnets and sno-cones, either.

So now you have no excuses — step away from the computer and get yourself out to Castle Dome! It’s a perfect time of year to go, the weather is perfect and the desert is beautiful. Not to mention that I have already given the road the “P.T. Cruiser Accessibility Test” (if you can make it in my car, you can make it any pretty much any kind of normal passenger vehicle!).

Pack a lunch, take plenty of water — and don’t forget your camera! (Take a closer look at this last photo — you may think the shadow in the foreground is a sahuaro, but it’s not … )

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 29th, 2008 at 1:22 pm and is filed under The Word from the Bird. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.