[UA] The UAest Place On Earth (or, at least, Colorado)

[holycrow at mindspring.com]

The Bishop Castle in Colorado is, if I understand the situation correctly, not technically a "building", although it contains rooms, stairways, ceilings and floors and is (in my rough estimate) at least 75 feet tall.  Rather than call it a "building", it is a "work of art" -- that way, there need be no concerns with building codes.

To enter Bishop Castle, you have to effectively sign a waiver stating that it's nobody's fault but your own if you get creamed by a piece of falling ironwork or if you fall off a tower and die.  Getting hurt at the castle is far from impossible.  There are ironwork scaffolds 20 and maybe even 40 feet off the ground that have no guard rails whatsoever.  Taking a picture of the Great Hall (a churchlike affair with a vaulted, cathedral ceiling and a huge window featuring a stained-glass wizard), I had to keep track of how far back I backed.  The back wall is unfinished and has no guard rail -- not even a rope -- and I could readily have backed right out and fallen 10-20 feet to the hard packed ground below.  

Bishop Castle (a work in progress) has no blueprint, and no written plan other than some crude sketches made by James R. Bishop.  He's making it up as he goes along.  The heights of the steps are not consistent.  The castle is mainly made of stone, concrete and wrought iron, along with some wood panels for ceilings, floors and the walls of the great hall.  I climbed the bell tower.  It is absolutely terrifying -- not only because the construction looks unsophisticated, and not just because I knew there were no safety regulations in effect, that no safety inspections had been performed.  That played a big part, certainly, but it was also terrifying because the steps were iron mesh or latticework, meaning you could look down and see through them all the way to the ground far below -- and you could look up and see how much further up the tower went.  (Strangely, I found the latter more terrifying.)  I'm not ashamed to admit that at several points I had to crawl up the stairs like!
!
!
 a crab.

(Actually, now that I think about that, it is fairly embarassing, isn't it?)

Bishop Castle was started in 1969, so it's a year older than I am.  There's supposedly a web site at www.castlecollectibles.com, but I couldn't get it to come up.  It's an impressive monument, particularly because every single stone was pesonally laid by Jim Bishop.

That's right.  This vast, thirty year castle, is all the hand labor of one individual.  

Now, the idea of someone making a castle in the middle of Colorado is pretty UA on its own.  Mr. Bishop's nigh-incessant feuding with the county officials about his castle adds a further UA twang.  But to me, what really makes this place UAble is that it is so much an expression of one man's obsession.  For thirty years he has built this unplanned monstrosity, simply because He Wills It.  That's gotta be good for some gaming.

That and the fact that the place is scary dangerous.

-G.

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