Colorado City is not that isolated. It is located along Arizona Highway 389 which becomes Utah Highway 59, the main route from Las Vegas—and, for that matter, Los Angeles—to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon and other sites such as Pipe Spring National Monument.
In 2008, I visited Colorado City and shopped in a food market. Here, I was greeted by a most amazing site. Most of the customers were young women in their 20’s who wore long nineteenth-century-style dresses either in solid colors or a checkerboard pattern. Even the cashier was wearing one of these dresses. The few men I saw seemed to be older, in their 40’s or beyond. All were wearing western shirts and some wore Stetson hats. The men and women seemed to have come there from the 1880’s through a time warp.
A couple of women in the store were wearing short pants, and I figured they were probably travelers passing through and not residents of the community.
The homes in the residential neighborhoods of Colorado City are mostly much larger—for obvious reasons—than the houses usually found in small desert communities.