Miami's
Boomtown Spree '06
The neighboring town of Miami held its annual Boomtown Spree April 21-23. The festival began on Friday night with a parade, BBQ, and street dance. We went Saturday morning to browse the street fair booths and car show, as well as catch some of the entertainment and the Arizona State Mining Championships. The day had begun with the Copper Crawl 13 (or 5k) Hill Run and the Keystone Stair Climb, a timed climb up the 150 steps of the narrow stairs at the end of Keystone Street. The stairs were built around 1910 to give miners access to the mine at the top of the hill from their homes below. The record was set by a 17-year-old teen in '02: 51 seconds!

The mining competitors compete in four categories: machine drilling, hand drilling, spike driving, and mucking (shovelling crushed rock into an ore car.) While many of the contestants are either current or former miners, the competition is open to anyone. As one contestant commented after his first try at mucking, it's not as easy as it looks. The record is a bit over 31 seconds to move almost 1000 pounds of gravel! That's a lot of shovelling.

Entertainers that we saw and/or heard included a mariachi band, a duo who did a "Blues Brother" routine, jazz and tap dancers, and Mexican folkdancers.

Boomtown continued on Sunday with the Red Springs Bed Race and children's mining contests.

Gov. Napolitano was scheduled to visit the festival Sunday afternoon.

For more information on Boomtown and Miami, please visit the Merchants Association of Miami's site.

The street fair
"The Blues Brothers"
Making fry bread at a food booth
Cars in the car show ranged from classic cars and pickups to
pro-street cars to race cars
This copper-clad trailer is touring the Southwest
as part of a living history project
sponsored in part by the UA Mineral Museum.
Historians are gathering stories from miners and retired
miners, as well as collecting mining memorabilia.
Click here to visit the project's site.
Here is a short video of Boomtown sights.
If you are on dial-up or don't want to wait for it to load, you can click the button below for a quick GIF "slideshow" instead.

             

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