Bedrock City at Raptor Ranch

On State Route 64 at Valle, about half an hour south of the Grand Canyon’s South Rim, Raptor Ranch keeps a Stone Age town inside its grounds. Bedrock City, the Flintstones park the Speckels family opened in 1972, is a walk-through village of concrete houses. The ranch says it is keeping the town open indefinitely, on the same hours as the rest of the grounds, 8 a.m. to sunset every day. Children five and under walk in free, and so does anyone camped in the ranch’s RV park.

The owners, Troy Morris and Ron Brown, are falconers. When they took over the property in 2019 they planned an adventure park with climbing walls, birds of prey demonstrations and “some prehistoric adventures.” Morris described the long aim: “Ultimately, we want to have all the birds of prey of North America with some exotics as well. There will be dozens of species here.” The ranch also runs Fred’s Diner, a name carried over from the old park.

Fred and Barney’s house, kept whole

In the summer of 2019 Morris walked a reporter through the part of Bedrock that would stay. “Fred and Barney’s house, the brontosaurus, woolly mammoth, Pebbles and Bam Bam, snake exhibit, those things will be centered in the children’s play area,” he said. The Flintstones vehicles would be grouped around the house, near the dinosaur slide and the snake. “This will be the part that will be unchanged. So all the people that love flintstones it will still be here.”

The ranch asks returning visitors to bring an old photograph taken at Bedrock and to stand for the same picture again. Those who do get in free, and the pairs go into a collage displayed in the café. The ranch’s own page shows Kurt Colin at Bedrock in 1980 and, in the same spot, his daughters in 2019.

Angle iron, wire mesh and gunite

The town began as an offshoot of another one. A group of investors obtained licensing rights to the Hanna-Barbera characters and opened a Flintstones park in Custer, South Dakota. Accounts of the Arizona start differ. The Associated Press, in 2015, called Bedrock City a spinoff of a park Francis Speckels’ parents started in Custer, and said Francis and his wife, Linda, began running the Arizona park in 1972. Cronkite News said that year that Linda and Francis bought the property in 1972, and that Francis had worked as a government contractor and as a partner in the South Dakota park. The Los Angeles Times gave the fullest version in 1997. In 1972, it said, Woodrow Speckels, one of the Custer investors, sold his stake and leased 40 acres about 25 miles south of Grand Canyon National Park. His son Francis, a South Dakota building contractor, agreed to sculpt another Flintstones park.

Linda was then a young mother of five girls. “You’ll move anyplace with the man you love,” she told the Times. “We made the trip in two days, in a Buick Limited packed full of kids and clothes.” The site had “not one tree on it.” That stretch of highway held a gas station, a rock-hound shop and a small Air Force outpost. By the time Linda and the girls arrived, Francis was already shaping the buildings and the massive bone-capped walls from angle iron and wire mesh, then plastering the frames with gunite. “He was an artist at what he did,” Linda said.

The family meant to finish the park and go back to South Dakota, which suited Linda; she liked green grass and broad-leaf trees, and said it took her 20 years to get used to Arizona. They stayed. Francis’ parents divorced in 1974, and when his mother was awarded the family’s share of the business, he bought it from her. The oil embargo slowed tourist traffic almost as soon as the doors opened. Water had to be trucked in, and thistles and tumbleweeds kept coming back. “We’re an overflow attraction, not a major destination,” Linda said. “If the Grand Canyon campgrounds get full, our campground gets busy. Get rich? We didn’t have that mentality. We wouldn’t know how to do that. What we had was perseverance. Or ignorance.”

Tulips in the red dust

Bob Sipchen of the Times described the park as he found it in 1997. Visitors drove through a giant concrete bone entryway into a gravel lot, where a hidden speaker played a scratchy audio loop of the Flintstone characters. A morning shower in the campground’s cavelike bathroom cost 50 cents, and coffee at Fred’s Diner cost 5. Inside the gate he found “a purple, green, yellow, red and blue pseudo-Stone Age ghost town, a pop and folk art Stonehenge.” Two bearded goats poked through the fence of a hut labeled “Goatasaurus.” In the domed Bedrock Theater, behind dusty leopard-skin curtains, a blank screen flickered while recorded voices of Wilma and Betty plotted against their husbands. A family that had paid $5 a head slid down Dino’s long green neck, then waited until a worker came to drive the little tram through a 40-foot volcano, where pterodactyls reeled round to rumbling sound effects.

The park ran on family labor. Gina, the youngest daughter, was 26 that year and had worked there for two decades. At six she slapped buns onto the grill at Fred’s Diner while her grandmother flipped the hamburgers, and she played house in the cave dwellings with her older sister Heidi. The girls rode a bus 30 miles to school in Williams. Summers meant waiting tables, painting Dino and pulling weeds.

In 1989 a doctor in Flagstaff told Francis he had lung cancer. He died six months later, on Easter Sunday. Linda said he told her, “If you have one problem, get out of there,” and added, “Well, we’ve had many problems. But we kept at it.” She began a garden in his memory, with a small pond and a fountain, in what she called the ugliest part of the park. The first year she planted 2,000 tulip bulbs.

On Thanksgiving about three years before Sipchen’s visit, Heidi was driving in from Flagstaff for the family dinner at the house Francis had built beside the park. She went off the road on Highway 17 and died. Afterward Linda set a goal of leaving by 2000. Her daughters had told her they did not want to run the place. Asked whether she resented the cartoon families that tied her to the work, she said, “We’re a lot like the Flintstones. Humble. Hard-working. And my husband really was a lot like Fred: gruff but affectionate.”

For sale at $2 million, then the birds

She was still there in 2015, at 73, when she listed the property for $2 million. The 30 acres held the 6-acre park, a 3,800-square-foot residence, restaurant, gift shop, theater, RV park and campground. Fred’s Diner served a Bronto Burger, a Chickasaurus Dinner and a Fishasaurus Sandwich. The Flintstones license would not go with the sale. “I’m 73 years old. I don’t have that many more years of adventure time left,” Linda said. “A lot of people think of this as art, especially architects and photographers.” Cronkite News found the concrete houses chipped and caked with dirt, and a Phoenix visitor, Jared Elizares, said, “It could use more maintenance.” Her daughter Holly Hulen said the family hoped a buyer would keep the art and the theme, “but we are OK with losing that, too.” The Custer park, run by a relative, Joe Speckels, sold for $1.5 million that same year and closed.

Bedrock City closed over a weekend in late January 2019, and a new owner was set to take over that Friday. The sale price was not disclosed. By July the owners had kept the town open a little longer, and Patti Chapman brought her family back from Payson for what they expected to be a last look. Her son Alex said, “It feels like I’m two again.”

Morris and Brown had conceived their adventure park in 2004, and the 2008 crash put it on hold. “Shortly after we decided to buy Bedrock City, I woke up in a cold sweat,” Morris said. “I had a dream that I sold everything, quit my job, and bought a cartoon town in the middle of the desert and then it hit me. I actually did this.”