Sibley Castle and Copper Creek Canyon near Mammouth, AZ

Thursday, March 23, 2017

Today we are going on another Jeep trip.  This time we headed just outside Mammouth, AZ to Sibley Castle via Copper Creek Canyon.

Sibley Castle or the Sibley Mansion was constructed in the early 1900's by mine manager R. Roy Sibley to impress investors interested in backing the mining operations located further down the canyon.

It had a second-story balcony, fireplaces, plastered and papered interior walls and a patio with fruit trees. It was built in the Spanish style of quarried granite walls, adobe cross-walls, and had a central patio with rooms all around. It had two fire places and two porch columns. The windows had genuine glass in them. The living room was 60 feet long. The home contained 20 rooms and polished oak floors, which were later scavenged for a building down toward Winkelman, AZ.

These are some of the exterior walls.

Today, there are a few concrete foundations and the walls of a couple of stone buildings that remain. In the 1970's a leaching operation was conducted at one of the old mines. The settling ponds remain from those days.

We stopped for lunch here at the castle.  There was a creek close by.  One of the Jeeps accidentally rolled backwards down into the creek.  Here is a video showing him driving up and out of the creek.  He made it look so easy!

Above is a large flat area close to where we all parked.  Following the trail between the trees leads to the creek seen below.  Notice the huge log/limb up in the tree's limbs.  Wondered about that.

Beautiful views as we left the castle area.

Off and on we did run into a little snow.  See the dark clouds.  For the most part it was a beautifully sunny day.  

We saw these pretty white flowers at one of our stops.  They were down a sharp drop off and facing the opposite direction.  This was the best picture.

Look at all the roads.  We are glad someone that knew their way was leading us.

Look at those awesome clouds!  

Many more roads.  Crazy!

These are the settling ponds talked about earlier.

Towards the end of the ride we saw the blooms just starting on a saguaro.  This is the only saguaro we saw blooming this day.  We had a wonderfully blessed drive today!