2025 Side Pony Music Festival

Bisbee, Arizona  - 2025 Side Pony Express Music Festival

I am once again off for a weekend trip to what has become  an annual event for me, the Side Pony Express Music festival in Bisbee, Arizona.  I sometimes fail to see the attraction once here, it's a bit chaotic as I don’t know the bands and I don’t even like many of them, but most are sort of outlaw oriented or just weird and I do like that.  I am actually repulsed by bands  that are too polished and professional.  

As the years go by, this festival has grown larger and more organized with 100 + participants this year. However, it is still a free event that helps the local Bisbee economy. This year they have a website with venue list, performer list and links to performers websites.  It’s really quite well done and helps to plan your time, you can the site at sideponyexpress.com

I arrived on the morning of November 8th and wandered around between venues into the late nights hours, then repeated it on November 9th.  As I’m in my stealth van, I park and sleep overnight on the street.  I have to say that in spite of the large crowds, the heavy drinking and other substance abuse and lack of security, I saw no issues anywhere.

Every year I seem to take the same photos over and over, I’m trying to limit that this year, but things do change from year to year.  It’s mostly about seeing the performers for me and in most situations I take only short iPhone videos, real camera shots are hard, it's always dark lighting, lack of focus and blocked views.  As this blog site limits video length, I can’t display much but I’ve attached a few of my favorites. I have added band names where I could, some are questionable.

Always a great view in Bisbee

Healthy options in a nice patio with hard rock on the rooftop

There is actually construction going on behind the tin barrier

Every year it changes usually for the worse !

Carlos Arzate & the Ghost Notes

Suntex Band from Portland. OR

Suntex Band

Lead localist with a great voice but hard to watch 

Honey Marie Knight Band

Ancient Egypt brings a pleasant weird vibe

He was a real street player with meaningful lyrics

Stairways are everywhere in Bisbee

Old Chevy truck in front of St Elmo's with matching pony

Great art on a stairway

Pretty cool rig with a handicap sticker and a great parking brake

          The Greta mobile is a regular at every Side Pony event

Interesting book store exhibit

I love this place

Gene's Place has a funky vibe

Honey Marie Knight Band 

Plum Band

This could be fun ?

I like interesting photo angles work

I am Hologram is full of energy

Interesting rustic interior of the Warner Hotel 

Mariachi Pueblo Viejo

That's it for this year, hope to be back in 2026.

 

Chiricahua National Monument

October 27 -30, 2025

It's a short camping trip to Chiricahua National Monument in Arizona in our new Integra Arc Camper Van.  We have thankfully rid ourselves of the mice from our previous trip.  The Chiricahua Mountains are a unique volcanic mountain range with amazing rock hoodoo spires, balanced rocks and great hiking trails.  We camped inside the Monument at the primitive Bonito Canyon Campground, no hookups with a maximum vehicle length of 29 foot.  The monument has a scenic, curvy paved road from the park entrance to its highest elevation at Massai Point.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiricahua_National_Monument 

We had a great campsite

 We park, it's so nice to have nothing to set up, and then go on a short hike from our campsite on the Silver Spur Meadow trail to Faraway Ranch.  A very easy trail through the forest along a dry creek bed with distant mountain views.

View along the trail

This is basically the view from our campsite

The CCC had a camp here that built it all

Sue posing in front of an old fire place

What is this rock structure on a hillside with a bared opening ?

We then took the slightly scarry narrow road to Massai Point,  and then wandered a while on the Massai Nature Trail loop.

Very cool views everywhere

We have no hookups here and are running off the house batteries to power the refrigerator, a few lights at night and the water pump intermittently.  There is a campground rest room with running water, so our fancy cassette toilet is not getting hard use.  Also we are not running the heater at all and are using a compact Butane fuel cook stove for cooking.  In spite of our low usage, the battery voltage discharges to 2/3 overnight, but we can run our generator to recharge. This rig is already solar prepped, so I see a solar panel in the future.  

We have an issue; the Van has a bed configuration that is (to us) very awkward to use and poorly designed. It works by removing all the couch cushions and then sliding the couch frame out from the wall on its slides and then positioning the removed couch cushions on top as the bed.  This sounds good in theory, but really doesn’t work so well in practice.  After setting it up and using it a few times, we have decided that it is more practical for Sue to sleep on the couch and for me to sleep on the floor in a sleeping bag.  I know this sounds weird, but it’s so much easier to do this way.  

On day 2 we drive to the Echo Canyon parking area and hike the Echo Canyon Trail.  It was a great trail of moderate difficulty with fantastic views walking amongst the towering Hoodoos and balanced rocks.  The trail traverses from the upper rock formations down to the creek level near the bottom and then gradually back to the top for a great cross section.

  

The campground host had told us to watch out for the Mexican bluejays if eating meals outside.  He said they will take food right out of your hand and possibly even take a chunk of your hand.  We didn’t have a problem at all, but we did see many of them and they are definitely aggressive and noisy, but beautiful.   

We also had another visitor, a Coati with a great long tail who on two occasions wandered through our campsite.

The Coati was checking us out

On day 3 our plan was to drive to the nearby town of Portal, New Mexico which we have heard much about, however when we started down the road, the washboard surface was very rough as in shaking the van apart. As it was going to be a 40 plus mile round trip we decided to turn around, but the road is definitely very scenic.

We then reversed direction back to Willcox, Arizona where we walked around the Main Street area and stopped for lunch at the Big Texan BBQ. 

This is a great museum

This is a crazy Halloween story

An added attraction is the bar at the other part of the building

Dead Peoples stuff

Back at the campsite, we took a short ride to the visitors center where we went on a short hike on the Lower Rhyolite Trail which was moderate and very scenic.

Lots of nice acorns

We head for home in the morning making one stop at the Dos Cabezas Pioneer Cemetery.  It contains many very interesting old gravestones.

We then drive straight back to Tucson.  It was a very short but successful road trip with perfect weather.