RYE » Jim Bishop shuffled slowly out onto the rickety metal bridge high atop
the signature castle he has been building in southern Colorado for more than half a century.

His back hunched, the wind whipping. Bishop stopped near the end of the bridge
that leads to nowhere. He turned, grabbing the iron railing. A wry smile appeared on his face as he shook the bridge back and forth, his slight frame
swaying in the cool mountain breeze.

"If I built it," Bishop said, "I can sure walk on it."

At 77, Bishop still has a wild side to him-the kind of attitude that tells you to
keep building a castle in the middle of nowhere by hand and by yourself since 1969.

But what happens when the king of the castle can no longer rule?

Bishop Castle, one of Colorado's quirkiest roadside attractions, is in the midst of
a transitional period after decades of autocratic rule-a bridge without a clear destination.

Bishop beat the cancer that doctors thought he would never overcome, but Parkinson's
disease has taken a toll on the builder. These days, he spends more of his time taking medication and resting by the fire than stacking stones, his son

Dan having taken over day-to-day operations of Bishop's magnum opus.

"Danny wants me to rest on my butt," Jim Bishop said with a smile. "But if this
probation goes too long, I'll say, 'Go to hell!' " Dan Bishop isn't sure what's next for Bishop Castle because there are no blueprints, just a vision from
the creator himself. He's building a new gift shop to replace the one that burned down in 2018 and may eventually connect the bridge that leads to nowhere.
He vows never to sell the land. But it all feels a bit weird to Dan. This isn't his masterpiece.

"If someone picked up a Picasso and started painting on it," he said, "then
it's not a Picasso anymore."

The legend of Bishop Castle

Now in its seventh decade, Bishop Castle continues to wow visitors from its
perch along Colorado 165 near the small town of Rye, nestled at 9,000 feet in the San Isabel National Forest.

By now, its origin story is the stuff of legend: Bishop says he bought the 2.5-acre
plot of land at 15 years old for $450 as a way to escape from Pueblo. Over the next 10 years, he and his father, Willard, began laying the
groundwork for a family cabin, using stones from nearby mountains.

As they built, neighbors remarked that the building looked awfully like a castle.
Bishop's father wanted nothing to do with a project of that magnitude, but Jim Bishop saw something there. So he continued to build-and build-and build.

On his website, Bishop claims his castle is the country's-and maybe even the
world's-largest one-man project, although he's only been on a plane twice in his life.

The castle is hardly a local secret anymore. It's featured on travel sites such
as Tripadvisor and has been promoted on countless travel lists-"13 of the most Instagramable locations in Colorado" or "Ten Weird and Wonderful
Colorado Attractions."

"We don't have a lot going on," said Deb Adams, Custer County's tourism chief,
with a laugh. "Bishop Castle is one of our main attractions in Custer County. It's such a unique architectural phenomenon-just the history of how it
was built, how quirky it is."

On a recent November day, the air unusually mild under an overcast sky, Bishop
came to his castle ready to work-at least for a short while. His current project consists of building a wall around the entire property, a task that
will take him the rest of his life, he said.

Visitors from El Salvador stopped Bishop to take pictures with him in front
of his life's work, and he happily obliged.

"They're more likely to donate if I do," Bishop said with a smile.

After loading up his yellow wheelbarrow, Bishop slowly pushed it down the hill,
pausing at the bottom to rest. Clad in a blue, stained "Jim Bishop" polo shirt and worn jeans, the builder remarked that his joints feel "real good"
today-although one of his hands was visibly swollen, an ace bandage wrapped around it.

"I'm getting younger," he said. With great care, Bishop tossed the rocks on
top of one another. He has adapted with age, learning to pivot on his feet to save himself steps.

Bishop looked across the twolane road. He walks over there occasionally
to pick up trash, the same place where his 4-year-old son, Roy, died in a tree-felling accident more than 30 years ago.

"He's safe," Bishop said. "He's in heaven."

Bishop is not a religious man-he doesn't believe in it, much like his
feelings on the White House-but he talks about God often.

"I'm God just by doing this," he said. "We're all gods."

The castle has been host to some 350 weddings over the years, Bishop guessed.
All he asks for is a small deposit to reserve the day, otherwise the place is yours. The castle has always been free-partly out of kindness and partly
because the building can't be insured.

Its magnificence-the stainedglass windows in the chapel, the ornate, twisting
metal staircases, the menacing dragon's head-belies the fact that it's still an open construction site. Metal hangs low through arched entrances,
small ropes cordon off areas where one could fall dozens of feet to the ground with a simple misstep.

There have been no serious injuries at the castle, the Bishops said-although
one woman did die from a heart attack on a buttress near the castle's base.

Raves, drugs and a wedding gone wrong

The castle has become one of Custer County's most prominent attractions, but
the builder's relationship with local officials over the years has been-complicated.

Bishop started construction on the castle before the county had zoning laws,
said Jackie Hobby, a Custer County planning and zoning official.

"We don't, at this point in time, have any apparent issues with them," she said.

Bishop said county officials mostly have left him alone over the years-although
that omits some relatively consequential details.

When Jim and his wife, Phoebe, were going through some struggles in the late
1990s, she started dancing at nightclubs, Dan Bishop said. Jim wanted his wife at the castle, so what did they do? They brought the party to Bishop Castle.

And by party, Bishop meant raves. Three-day, drug-filled benders with as many as
1,500 people that began on Friday night and didn't stop until Sunday afternoon. Ravers once built a human wall on the highway, just because, Dan
"People were literally passing out upside-down, sleeping in the middle of the
yard," Dan said. "Tourists would come Saturday morning and find these drunk and high partiers littering the landscape. That was a really bizarre
time in the existence of Bishop Castle."

These parties drew the ire of neighbors, and got the attention of county
commissioners and law enforcement officials, who received complaints from trespassing and public urination to overt drug use and excessive noise,
The Denver Post reported in a 1998 story about the raves.

"I've had people tell me they are afraid to go outside of their homes on weekends
because of the types of clientele he has, and they're afraid to go and leave their home vacant," Custer County Commissioner Cleo Day told The Post at
the time. "That's not fair to the surrounding residents."

The county eventually got a court-ordered injunction to stop the debauchery.

But in 2002, a wedding-turnedrave provided one of the most dramatic moments in
the castle's storied history-one that could have ended the entire project.

The way Dan tells it, some ravers wanted to get around the injunction, so they
threw a wedding at the castle instead. That wedding turned into an all-night party.

"They refused to stop," Dan said. "And it turned into a gunfight."

Dan said he "made a noise with a shotgun" to get people to leave. "The next thing
you know, it's a two-year battle with the court system over 17 felonies."

Dan and his father were charged with a host of felony menacing counts. They went
all the way to trial, with a Custer County jury finding Jim not guilty on all charges. Dan was acquitted on 16 of the 17 counts, receiving 30 days in jail
and two years of probation for reckless endangerment, court records show.

"I was happy to serve my 30 days," Dan Bishop said.

The castle is the way it is today-"a nice, calm, do-what-you-want experience,"
Dan said-because of what he went through during that seven-day trial.

"It's been a life!" Dan said with a laugh.

Tom Flower, a current Custer County commissioner, chuckled when a Post reporter
called about Bishop Castle.

Flower likes to tell people that if they want the real Bishop Castle experience,
holler for Jim and tell him you think the government is doing a good job. He'll lose his mind."

There are numerous signs outside the castle that let visitors know exactly how
Bishop goes about his life, and he frequently goes off on diatribes about various government entities and their, err, disfunction or alleged sinister dealings.

"You might experience foul language!" one sign reads outside the castle.
"You might experience strongly expressive behavior!"

Roadside America, an online guide to offbeat tourist attractions, added a
isclaimer on the bottom of its Bishop Castle entry, saying: "Bishop's Castle may look like Hogwarts, but Jim Bishop is no cuddly Dumbledore. He's a
tough-talking man with strong beliefs, and sometimes he expresses them bluntly and loudly. If you or your children want to avoid potentially offensive rants,
you may want to steer clear."

Bishop was arrested in 2016 and charged with a series of biasmotivated crimes after
authorities say he repeatedly yelled a racial slur and threatened a group of Black tourists visiting his castle, according to a sheriff's incident report.

A jury acquitted him on all charges, court records show.

What's next for Bishop Castle?

When he's not working, Jim Bishop likes to sit by the campfire on the site of
the not-yet-built gift shop next to the castle with his dog Marley, an excitable brown spaniel.

He pulled out old pictures of Phoebe, who died of cancer three years ago.

They were married 50 years, and Bishop invokes her name often. He recalled the
time Phoebe took a halogen light miles away to test how far you could see from the top of the castle.

They used to discuss who would play each other in a movie of their lives-Bishop
pulling for Catherine Zeta-Jones to portray Phoebe, while she quipped that he should be played by Clint Eastwood.

After a few minutes, tears streamed down his cheek, Bishop's body shaking slightly.

"She did a lot for me, I'll tell you," Bishop said quietly, looking at a younger
portrait of his wife. "Guess I'll put 'em back in the case now."

As he and Phoebe fought their own forms of cancer, "I felt like dying then,"
Bishop said. "But God had more plans for me."

With his cancer gone, it's Parkinson's and bipolar disorder that have led
Bishop to cede the castle's reins to his son.

He holds out his palms. "See? No shakes," Bishop said. But Dan Bishop has had
to put his father on a type of probation-changing the code on the Bobcat construction vehicle and taking his father's car keys to save him from himself.

"I think his mind will go before his body," Dan said. "Dad lives in a fantasy
world sometimes."

His father goes through spells of mania that he can't control, even ending up
in court recently after he fought someone over crayons at a behavioral health unit.

"I'm a diagnosed manic, but not a maniac!" Jim Bishop said with a laugh.

Dan sold his house in Pueblo and moved in with his father to provide more care.
A granddaughter has started caring for Jim once a week.

One of Jim's three surviving children, Dan said he's "known in his heart that
I'd take over here."

Still, he acknowledged that "this one here is a drastic transition." He's got
the gift shop on the docket and hopes to add a six-table eatery, too. Perhaps he will install a button visitors could press that would give information
on different parts of the castle. Dan doesn't plan to hire a crew to do any of the work-that's not in the Bishops' nature.

But even as Dan takes on more and more of the operations, Jim Bishop is still here
multiple days a week, lugging bright yellow wheelbarrows full of rocks. Despite the probation, Dan doesn't fret about his father continuing to work.

"If he dies doing that, that wouldn't be the worst way to go," he said. "Sometimes
I wonder if I'm going to go looking for him and find him dead."

Dan disagrees with his father's technique of dry-stacking rocks to build the wall
around the castle. But he doesn't intervene-he just lets his dad keep doing what he's been doing.

"Who am I to tell him not to build a castle, right?" Dan said.

Sam Tabachnik: stabachnik@denverpost.com or @sam_tabachnik

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