Castle Dome Mine Museum

Saturday, 29 December 

While most of our friends are enduring much more winter like weather, we decided that golf yesterday was too wintery for us.  So we took the day off from golf.  While we waited for it to warm up, we took advantage of the nice laundry.

After lunch, we ventured out.  It was a sunny 53 degrees, with 20-30mph wind.  We picked the Castle Dome Mine Museum (www.castledomemuseum.org) 

located about 30 miles north of Yuma to visit.

Castle Dome City was a mining town that originally grew up around some silver and lead mines in the 1864.  At one time, the population was over 5,000 people, making it larger than Yuma at the time.  The area had lots of mines where geologic upheavals had brought silver and lead, and some gold, close enough to the surface to mine.  Some of the ore was so high grade that it was not deemed worthwhile to smelt it.

Mining in Castle Dome continued until 1979 when silver prices dropped making mining unprofitable.  The mines and buildings were abandoned.  The local newspaper wrote in 2011 that “Castle Dome was just one celebrated gunfight from being an international tourist destination. ... all the other elements were there - booming silver mines, a rowdy populace with a colorful cast of characters and plenty of gunplay.”

As the Fish and Wildlife Service sought to protect wildlife, they were closing the area off.  The museum owners salvaged artifacts from the federal government land and put them on display in the restored buildings.  “Restored” being a relative term as it appeared to us that many of the signs to describe things were in need of repair or replacement.

Probably the most surprising to us was several mine shafts in the ground.  The placards indicated they went down 150 to 350 feet, and one had 1/2 mile of tunnel at depth.  All the mine shafts were fenced off with barbed wire, only one had a significant barrier.  Someone climbing over the fence could fall 150 feet.

To get there, we drove 11 miles north of Yuma Proving Grounds on Arizona 95, then turned off to the northeast.  The sign said Castle Dome Museum was 10 miles.  What the sign did not say is that the pavement stopped in 3 miles, and the last 7 miles were a gravel road.  Likely considered an “improved” gravel road as it was graded, and two lanes wide.  However, Sprinty could only travel at 10mph due to all the shaking due to Sprinty’s one-ton chassis.  We took some comfort that we were keeping up with the pickup truck ahead of us, which was also traveling at only 10mph.  14 miles of gravel road in one day exceeded Sprinty’s quota for the month.