pPeople look at it and think man how can one man do this in his lifetime? But it wasn't in
his lifetime, it was in a third of his lifetime because the other two-thirds were spent making
money to do. It's only ever been in his head. How did he figure it out? He just started stacking one
rock on top of the other and making shapes out of it and 53 years later this is what you get.
Simple. A simple man with a big project .[Music]
All right, I'm Dan bishop and this is the castle my dad built, Jim Bishop. [Music]
We have no idea how many tons of rock and concrete he's put in there over the years.
Every one of these rocks comes from locally off the National Forest, Road ditches, creek beds. You
can see the crane in the background of the shot right here. I bought that for 500 dollars out
of a junkyard and I've been using the crane. The way my dad did it was with a pickup truck,
a cable and a couple of block and tackle pulleys and a basket. And he would haul the rock in,
throw it on the dirt, he'd put it on the basket. Then he would hook the truck up to the cable,
back the truck up, pull the basket up, then he would get up and take it by hand off of
the basket and stack it in spot. Use it up, repel down a rope and do it all over again.
People are like you must have had some Machinery to do this? Nope just that old beat up truck.
Over the last couple years my Dad's health has declined, as Parkinson's has made it hard for
him to do anything and I'm pretty much in charge up here now, I've taken over. Do you remember
what year you started?1969. Same year as men on the moon and Woodstock. He started me in 73 so
he started Castle Building before he started uh human building. nd it's been a part of my life
for all of my life I can remember climbing around on top of it putting cement in the On
Top of the Rock civil building that's the very beginning of the castle right here in June 1969
he started building a rock Cottage and this was the first room of it this water tank standing in
the corner back here they decided to stand that up and then build a staircase around
it and make it a two-story Cottage and with the combination of the arched windows and the round
Tower people that drove by said it looked like a castle after four years of building this part
right here in 73 my dad started digging another hole out front my grandpa asked him what are you
building Jim what are you doing now because people want a castle I'm going to build him
a castle and my grandpa says that's it I'm done and so since 1973 it's been entirely a one-man
project because my grandpa didn't want to have anything to do with building the castle he said
don't we try to come to the mountains to get away from people my dad is a bit of an egotist
and there came a point where he decided he had done so much of this by himself that he wanted
credit for it being a one-man project and so at very young age I wasn't allowed to help because
if people saw me helping it made a liar out of it so here we are on the second level of the castle
this little large room right here the plan for it is to turn it into a little Museum probably
have artifacts from things that have been used to build in it and just old antique stuff like
that old ringer wash machine that's been sitting in here my mom used to do laundry up here with
that when I was a kid but nobody ever lived in it it never got to a point where you could eat it
so it started out as one room and the more it grew the more it grew in his head and then he would get
an idea to add this to it and how am I going to add this to it it got up to a point where he was
afraid that the walls might fall out so when it got to a certain height he decided to put
the flying buttresses on that would keep it from falling outwards this buttress down here with the
steps on it this was the very first of the flying buttresses one of the things that a lot of people
don't know the Castle is all dug into bedrock and sit right on Solid Rock and that buttress right
there goes 15 feet into the ground so there's a whole part of the castle that you don't see
that's underground this roof each one of those sheets he bent from a flat piece and put them on
himself these were a form that he built and during the winter months he would pour these haul them up
with the cable and set them in place the only part of the castle you'll find that my dad didn't build
he installed the stained glass but most of the stained glass is built by a couple various artists
this iron work right here is kind of unique to the structure as well my dad dropped out of high
school when he was 15 just do the iron work in Pueblo and so the cast has got all kinds of this
Ornamental Iron in the early years it was just weekends in the summer the rest of the time he
worked for a living building the patio covers and no guards railings stuff like that only but
have extra material from a jaw figure out a way to place it in the castle it takes a lot of use
if there's anything I have to do to maintain the place more than anything right now it's coming
in Wild new tread plates on the stairs we had a lot of people in here it's a very big tourist
attraction a lot of people know it all over the world it's been on International TV channels
and Word of Mouth gets out there we don't do any advertisement we depend on just people going out
and telling their family that hey you know what we saw so this is the part we call the Great Hall had
lots of weddings there's been musical events for a while there my dad kind of went a little nuts
and let the ravers have weekend parties here that was that was pretty insane but they loved it that
one Rave there were like 50 people just that it just collapsed in the middle of the night
one night just sleeping upside down in the dirt and the tours come in on a sad Sunday morning
I just couldn't figure out what was going on right my Dad loved the Raves and the attention
he got from it because if there's anything more that has built Bishop castle that just showed
a determination is the attention he got while he was building it they still call sometimes
wanting to know if they can throw a raid but the county imposed an injunction against the all-night
musical parties here so if you look at each one of them things right there they're all uniform right
they were built on the ground in sections and then he had a big scaffolding and he put the first one
up they put the second one up and he moved the scaffolding back and he just worked his way back
and assembled in place it's the same thing with the dragon on the front it took him six months
to build a dragon and then it was brought up and hoisted up with a pulley and welded in place well
that would get the attention to the news media they were ignoring me all they could locally
and when I put that Dragon up there they quit ignoring me it's actually built out of discarded
stainless steel warmer trays from the hospital and he took each warmer tray and cut it into 8D
shaped scales and then pop riveted each one to the metal frame there was like something like 12
000 hand-driven pop rivets in the dragon alone to create that these balconies are an add-on idea
what made him decide to put the balconies on here I'm not really sure I you would think that he's
been stacking Rock he'd done enough but one day he decided to build a six foot wide balcony hanging
off the side of the castle out of iron and there's no real Rhyme or Reason to where it came from
the idea here is to have an elevator that'll service the three stories it's got a Jeep winch
in it right now if I put a little work into it I could get it to where to go up and down but
it's by no means meets any safety standards and I wouldn't want anybody on it right this Square
tower that comes up it's 160 foot from the ground to the top of the Spire up there there was a time
when where he was hauling three tons of rock every two days and installing it in that summer and that
Tower went like 60 feet in one summer it's just insane the way he would wake up with the sun
and get in that truck right there and go out and load it Plum full of rock he would put the rocks
on the platform get in the truck and back the truck up the reason why that Tower is that tall
it's because he couldn't back up any further without driving off the cliff foreign as it
is with everything right now the biggest expense to building Castle was the fuel money it took to
get the cement here we're poor people we've always been poor people my mom did things on a shoestring
budget and I'd be surprised if all together you had 200 000 into material over the years because
the rock is free where'd you got all the stones pictures public lands due to public service now
the Government tried to stop it from getting it for free so for a while there he was paying
15 cents a ton to get a permit from the national forest and then they finally just give up on that
after a while and he hasn't bought a permit in a long time my dad doesn't like to do anything that
doesn't make sense and there's too many rules on the books that make no sense when he was a young
kid early teens it went to Seven Falls and it was all my grandmother and grandfather could do to
pay the admission price to get in and then when he got in he was climbing on some rocks as they
came over the loudspeaker hey you little kid on the mountain get off of there and it embarrassed
him and so he decided when he was a young kid that he was going to do something for the people
where it didn't cost a lot of money for a poor man to go and enjoy it and then he wasn't going
to tell people how to act when they got there me and him both consider this to be one of the last
true places of freedom in the world you might if you stick around here long enough catch somebody
climbing over the edge of the top and Swinging off from a rope it's not unheard of for people to do
crazy stuff like that up here and as a bishop the guy running the place I'll just stand back
and watch you know anywhere else you'd go there'd be you got to sign some insurance waiver and all
this but because we don't charge we're not running a business we're not responsible for their welfare
it's an enter at your own risk if you do not agree do not enter this is private property I have this
theory that in the safety minded world that we live in we actually create danger by masking it
nobody's ever fallen off of this but as they come up they're scared to death they're
hanging on tight they're not testing this or that they're they're not leaning on a railing going oh
it happened here they're afraid it's going to fall off therefore they don't push on it right
and amazingly and in the Years nobody's ever gotten hurt on this thing really hurt we looked
into trying to ensure it nobody will touch it so we'll head on up these stairs that he built I
don't remember what year he built the stairs in here but they didn't exist for a long time you
could see where he drives the pin into the Rock then he would lay the step and weld the PIN to
the step and just worked his way up one step at a time this little bridge over here is pretty neat
this is one of those ideas that you would be like why is this here well he decided when he got this
Tower here and he got that chimney Tower over here wouldn't it be cool if I built a walkway
that went across from one Tower to the other so there was a time when he was actually out here
building with nothing over here so he was hanging in the air on the steel that he was building
this is an example of how he got the material up here he would hang a pulley off of that point drop
the cable down build up to the pulley and then he would weld more iron scrap up and hang the pulley
another 10 foot high and build up to it again so the idea of this metal structure right here it's a
geodesic dome his idea was to put one-way mirrors you could see out and at night the Moonlight as it
spun because it's built on the track and it'll go around in circles would be like a big disco ball
and that if there were aliens visiting from outer space it would attract them and then we could
open the place up free to aliens as well the big permanent pictured in his head that I think I have
a similar picture in my own head is two and a half acres surrounded by wall with vendors and like a
Renaissance festival happening all the way around the two and a half acres I just need to get bigger
that being retired you won't and I pray to God every night that I get back to my hotel
and start working again there's this thing going on right now with my dad where he might be better
off in a retirement home but I believe in the same kind of Freedom that he does and this is
where he wants to be sitting out there telling the story to people I enjoy people's company I like to
show them what I've done hopefully we can keep him right up here till the day he dies because I know
this is where he wants to be I'm Jim Bishop and the castle is a good thing I ever made
foreign