A 160-Foot Castle Near Rye, and the Son Who Never Wanted It

A 15-year-old kid mowing lawns and tossing newspapers in Pueblo saved up $450 and bought himself two and a half acres in the Wet Mountains. That was 1959. Jim Bishop had no idea he was buying the rest of his life.

Most people drive past the turnoff on CO-165 near Rye without a clue what is back in those trees. Then the thing comes into view. Stone and iron, about 160 feet tall, towers and wrought-iron bridges and a grand ballroom with stained-glass windows. And up top, a dragon head that breathes actual fire. The dragon is welded from recycled stainless-steel hospital trays, and the fire comes from a donated hot-air-balloon burner. I am not making a word of this up.

Jim Bishop built it by hand. Decade after decade. Hauling stone, setting iron, climbing scaffolding into his seventies. He died on Nov. 21, 2024, in Pueblo at 80, after Parkinson's disease finally took the strength out of a man who spent sixty years defying gravity on the side of a mountain.

So here is the question nobody really answered while Jim was alive. What happens to a castle that one obsessed man built, once that man is gone?

The reluctant heir

The answer, for now, is Daniel Bishop.

Daniel was born in 1973, the first child of Jim and Phoebe Bishop. He grew up with this place as his father's whole world, which is a particular kind of childhood if you think about it. Your dad is not coaching Little League. Your dad is building a 160-foot castle in a national forest.

The Gazette ran a long piece on Daniel on Nov. 9, 2026, under the headline "The reluctant heir: A complicated inheritance at Bishop Castle." That word, reluctant, is doing a lot of work. This is not a guy who dreamed of inheriting a roadside attraction. This is a son standing inside something enormous that his father left behind, figuring out how to keep it standing.

And keeping it standing is the whole job. Because the castle has never really stopped being a work in progress.

This place has taken real hits

Here is the part people miss when they pull off the highway for a free selfie. Bishop Castle runs on almost nothing.

Admission is free, year-round, dawn to dusk. Always has been. The whole operation has lived on visitor donations and whatever the gift shop pulled in. Then in 2018, the old family home and gift shop, which was the main source of income, burned down. That same stretch of time, Phoebe Bishop died. One year the family lost the house, the shop, and the mother. Let that sink in.

The losses go back further than that. In 1988, a Bishop brother named Roy died, and the Gazette's reporting describes it as a day that shadowed the family and the castle for years after. These are not tidy history-book tragedies. These are real people with names, and the grief is baked into the stone as much as the mortar is.

The danger has not stopped either. This past June, the castle's caretaker was expanding a roof next to the castle when he fell. He broke ribs, fractured his pelvis, and got airlifted to Colorado Springs. That is the reality of maintaining a hand-built iron castle. There is no OSHA inspector. There is a guy on a roof and a long way down.

The fight over who owns a dream

And then there is the part that reads like a courtroom drama, because it was one.

At one point Jim and Phoebe Bishop were both diagnosed with cancer. In that window, a trustee named David Merrill gained control of the castle. Control of the thing Jim bought as a teenager and built with his own hands. A judge eventually ordered the title returned to Jim Bishop, so the story ended the right way. But think about what that means. A man can spend sixty years building something and still have to go to court to prove it is his.

That is the inheritance Daniel stepped into. Not just stone and iron. A legal history, a family history, and a running tab of repairs with no steady income to pay it.

Why you should still go

For anybody keeping score, the castle sits at 12705 CO-165, Rye, CO 81069, up in the Wet Mountains inside San Isabel National Forest. Figure about 90 minutes from Colorado Springs and roughly two and a half hours from Denver. Hayley and I have made that drive, and the Wet Mountains alone are worth the gas. The castle is the payoff.

Go climb it. The walkways are narrow and the whole thing sways a little in the wind, which is either a feature or a reason to reconsider your choices, depending on your relationship with heights. Bring cash. Not because anyone will make you, but because this is one of the last truly free, genuinely strange roadside attractions left in Colorado, and it survives on whatever people drop in the box.

Here is the thing. Plenty of attractions in this state are polished and corporate and perfectly fine. This one is a dead man's impossible dream being held up by his reluctant son. That is rarer than a fire-breathing dragon made of hospital trays. And you can go stand inside it this weekend for free.