Columnist Susan Snyder: Chloride festival is all mine

Monday, June 20, 2005 | 8:16 a.m.

Mining for tourists' money is more lucrative than digging for gold or silver in Chloride these days.

As with many of the West's boom-and-bust mining settlements, selling the past is paving the way to the future.

So if you're looking for a reason to hit the road this weekend, you might consider crossing the Arizona border and celebrating Old Miner's Day with the residents of the Arizona town.

Population, 450.

"It's the kind of town that if you sneeze, everybody says, 'God bless you,' " said Donna Meyer, vice president of the Chloride Chamber of Commerce and clerk in the Mineshaft Market.

Chloride lies about 4 miles east of U.S. 93 off a road that intersects the highway 53 miles south of Hoover Dam and 20 miles north of Kingman.

Yeah, I didn't think there was anything out there either.

Meyer, whose boyfriend, Allen Bercowetz, owns the town's only market, runs the chamber and visitors' center out of the store.

"I'll call you back as soon as I have my customers out the door," she said when I called her Friday morning.

She called back a few minutes later and explained that she and Bercowetz moved there from Kentucky about 18 months ago, after he visited purely out of curiosity. Bercowetz noticed a sign for the road to Chloride while driving to Las Vegas to attend a retail trade show.

"He thought, 'Bet I could get a burger and a beer up there,' " Meyer said. "He went into the bar on the corner, and there were eight or nine people inside. When he walked through the door, conversation stopped. Then everyone said, 'Hi! Who are you? Come in and have a beer.' It was different."

The couple had been longing to move to the Southwest and open a store but had found most ventures a bit too expensive. But in looking around Chloride, they discovered the Mineshaft had just gone on the market, so they snapped it up and moved from the middle of Kentucky to the middle of nowhere.

"The price was right, and we saw a lot of unmet potential," Meyer said. "So here we are."

Theirs is the town's only market. There also are two gift shops, three antique stores and one silversmith's shop, one RV park and one motel. For food, there's D.J.'s Saloon and Cafe or Yesterday's, down at the motel.

"Our economic base is tourism or Social Security," Meyer said, only half joking.

Saturday's festival will include food and arts and crafts vendors starting at 10 a.m. and a parade down Tennessee Avenue -- the town's main road -- at noon.

There will be games in the park, including a find-the-nickel-in-the-haystack competition for children and a "Wheel of Fortune"-type game for adults to raise money for renovating the two-cell jail dating to the 1890s.

"It's a real different experience. I've never lived in a place quite this small," Meyer said. "Everyone knows everything. Sometimes we need to go to Kingman to have dinner, just to sit in a restaurant where nobody knows us."

For information on the festival or the town, call (928) 565-4888.